A judgment on those of us who had the temerity to laugh during Borat.
A melancholy, disheartening look back at a stolen Kazakh childhood.
Shayakhmetov tells the lamentably familiar story of the triumph of the better-armed. In this case, the victor is the Stalin-run Soviet Union, and the loser and the spoils both are the unwillingly collectivized nomads of Kazakhstan. Shayakhmetov was just seven years old in 1929 when his father, a slightly wealthier peasant than most, was branded a class traitor and sent to a prison camp to die. But this story begins much earlier, with the first colonial overtures of Russia into Kazakhstan in the 1880s, when a Russian commander declared “our business here is a Russian one…all the land populated by the Kazakhs is not their own,” to the disastrous Soviet policies of resettlement of the Steppe-dwelling nomads in the 1920s. Shayakhmetov survived the seizure of his family’s property and the destruction of his people’s lifestyle to eventually become a teacher and then a regional head of education in Kazakhstan. But from the first chapter, entitled “The Life We Lost,” it is clear that being forced to relinquish the ways of his childhood burned those details deeper into his memory. The elegant, mournful translation suits Shayakhmetov’s potent, detailed descriptions, such that readers will smell the seasons change, feel the rough yurt walls in which his family lived and visualize contented young boys herding goats on the Steppes. But these relatively peaceful times were all too brief. Soon his family and his tribe became embroiled in show trials and forced relocations, and the author was thrown out of school. The book ends as World War II is drawing to a close, but the changes wrought in that 16-year period are astonishing and terrible to behold.
A judgment on those of us who had the temerity to laugh during Borat.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58567-955-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Rookery/Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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