A poignant, relevant synthesis of cultural studies and true-crime drama.
A compact, thoughtful debut addressing violence, immigrant identity, and the long shadow of the Vietnam War.
Rekdal (English/Univ. of Utah), who received the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, begins with a vicious attack in Salt Lake City by a homeless Vietnamese refugee, Kiet Thanh Ly, who stabbed random white men while shouting “You killed my people!” The author argues that the perpetrator represents a broader “disturbed appropriation of the war and its aftershocks.” “When I read about Ly’s case,” writes Rekdal, “some part of me saw his crime as a brutal way to counteract that invisibility, to kill the ideal that he could never achieve.” From there, she blends aspects of personal narrative with a consideration of the nature of survival, as experienced both by often traumatized refugees and by Ly’s victims, as well as a social history of how the Vietnamese re-established their own identities after trauma, both in Vietnam and in America, where nearly 1 million arrived in the postwar years. “To outsiders,” she writes, “the Vietnamese who resettled in the United States look like a success story continually in the making.” Yet, Rekdal argues that disturbing stories like that of Ly or the perpetrators of a grisly 1991 appliance-store massacre demonstrate that refugee trauma can be passed along biologically, as hypothesized about descendants of Holocaust survivors. The author effectively uses interviews with various people in constructing this discussion, including Ly’s victims and other refugees who knew Ly before the attack. One noted that the community’s difficult experiences “came not from war or relocation, but from the long and sometimes failed process of assimilation.” Her writing about Vietnam (where she traveled) as a newly evolved environment and her family’s experience with identity in the face of war (an uncle won a Bronze Star in Vietnam) all feels authentic and effective, although her discussion of the violent flashpoint at the book’s center could use a clearer interpretive focus.
A poignant, relevant synthesis of cultural studies and true-crime drama.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8203-5117-9
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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