A distinguished accomplishment that radiates both intelligence and spiritual awareness. Informative and moving. (line...
Incisively told, remarkable story of a long journey from the hills of Burma to Cambridge University, from a young Burmese man now living in Britain.
Born in 1967, Pascal is a member of the Padaung, a mountain tribe with its own language and customs, its religion a mixture of animism, Buddhism, and Catholicism. Living on the edge of the jungle, the tribe members farm and hunt. Pascal’s father was a veterinarian who prospered until the so-called Socialist-Nationalist Ne Win set up a one-party state and transformed Burma, once a rich country, into one of the poorest. Pascal details that political history and offers vivid portraits of daily and family life as he records his early school years, his time in seminary, then his decision at 17 to leave and study English at the university in Mandalay. There, conditions and teaching were abysmal: 150 students often had to share a single copy of a book. To pay his fees, he waited tables at a Chinese restaurant, where his conversation about James Joyce with some English visitors led to his meeting, in 1988, their friend from Cambridge, Dr. Casey. Shortly thereafter, the government began ruthlessly eradicating all dissent. Moe, the girl Pascal loved, was jailed, then died in prison, and monks and students were brutally massacred. Previously apolitical, Pascal became deeply involved, and, when sought by the authorities, left his family. Enduring countless hardships, he headed with companions through the mountainous jungle to the rebel-held area on the Thai border. There, despairing of being able to change the situation in Burma, he wrote to Dr. Casey, who arranged for him to travel to Cambridge in 1989 and study English literature. Pascal’s English was not good, he was often lonely and homesick, but he persevered, graduating in 1994.
A distinguished accomplishment that radiates both intelligence and spiritual awareness. Informative and moving. (line illustrations, b&w photos)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-050522-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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