To readers of this memoir, however untraveled, Tibet will never again seem remote or unfamiliar. The author embodies in his personal story the trials of his country under half a century of Communist Chinese rule. In 1992, Gyatso, a Buddhist monk then 59 years old, fled from Tibet to Dharamsala, India, where the exiled Dalai Lama encouraged him to write his autobiography. The chronicle of Gyatso's early adult years provides a window onto the ways of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery; the rest of his memoir, however, is largely about prison life. For after China invaded Tibet in 1950, claiming it for part of the People's Republic, many native monks, deemed politically reactionary, were thrown in jail. Gyatso was arrested in 1960 for refusing to accuse his teacher of spying for India. In prison he endured repeated interrogations, shacklings, and beatings at the hands of his captors. For his ability to bear up with dignity under such conditions, both Gyatso and the Dalai Lama, who wrote this book's foreword, credit his Buddhist training. But Buddhist teachings on meditation, suffering, and compassion are invoked here only tangentially. This is all the more noticeable when Gyatso himself questions the tradition: For example, he wonders why a learned monk of his acquaintance would show fear in the face of death, while a layman untrained in Buddhist philosophy can somehow manage to accept his own execution in peace. Gyatso leaves the question hanging. He refrains from asking Buddhism, which offers so many insights into individual suffering, to explain why whole nations suffer. Nor will readers find sustained reflection on the uses of Buddhist teachings to political resisters. Nevertheless, the writer gives witness to physical and mental anguish, inviting sympathy for the Tibetans while also asking for political intervention on their behalf. Gyatso reminds us that the language of suffering is universal. (11 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8021-1621-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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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