A sprawling, compelling autobiography marred by occasionally uneven prose.
In this debut memoir, a fiercely independent woman traces her life from Japan to America to Germany, chronicling vast cultural shifts and her own personal struggles.
The author had a privileged but strict childhood in 1930s Japan; she had five other siblings, and as a result, she was never alone and never bored for long. Her life changed drastically, however, when World War II swept in and her family home was nearly destroyed in an air raid. Hunger and fear ran rampant across the country, and the landscape of her youth steadily eroded as the American occupation took hold. Later, as a young adult, she worked as a typist, dreaming of moving to America on scholarship. But after she received an anonymous letter pegging her as a communist, it destroyed both her plans and her employment. When she finally made it to the United States in 1953 to study sociology, she immediately took to her new life; stubborn and eager to learn, she decided against returning to Japan, much to the chagrin of her mother, and continued her education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There, she fell hard for one of her professors, Hans Gerth, who was 17 years her senior, and married him amid much controversy. In 1971, Hans accepted a teaching position in his home country of Germany, where the couple found themselves at the center of political turmoil. Later, as a widow in a country where she barely spoke the language, Gerth found a new, invigorating career as a translator and interpreter. The author meticulously highlights the cultural nuances of each place she lived, and her endless ambition and passion are palpable—and by the end, so are her heartbreaks. However, the grammar is imperfect at times, which gives the book a choppy nature. Sometimes it gets bogged down listing the author’s smallest memories, detracting from the flow of the engaging story. Other autobiographies focus heavily on flashy or dramatic events, but this one gives every event equal weight, valuing comprehensiveness above all. That said, readers interested in travel, varied cultural perspectives and the lives of tenacious women will eagerly follow Gerth’s journey.
A sprawling, compelling autobiography marred by occasionally uneven prose.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481710176
Page Count: 446
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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