As startling and memorable as fiction and ripe for film adaptation.
A rare and beautiful love story between a British-American “sailor boy” and a cultured, older Japanese woman who had lived through the World War II years.
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Brinkley-Rogers was not yet a U.S. citizen in 1959 when he was serving the beginning of a stint on the USS Shangri-La, anchored off the seaport of Yokosuka, Japan. He was 19 and a wannabe poet when he met the mysterious, incomparable Kaji Yukiko (not her real name) in a bar, the White Rose, catering to the Western service clientele. What ensued was an astonishing relationship during the spring and summer months of 1959. Yukiko, 31, was raised in Manchuria and fled with her family after the war to Japan, where, as a young woman, she became the mistress of some gangsters in Hiroshima and finally escaped to work as a hostess in the White Rose. Full of secrets and wounds, Yukiko was, above all, a very educated woman who seized on the young British-born poet as a like-minded refugee who needed guidance in the literary and cinematic history of her country. During these months of brief meetings and through her exquisite letters, she essentially molded the “sailor boy” into a man capable of sublime thoughts and deep love. Yukiko encouraged Brinkley-Rogers to go to college and become a great poet and writer—and he did, over a long, varied career, finally settling in Arizona in retirement, where he unearthed Yukiko’s letters in 2014 and plunged into a maelstrom of memories that spurred him to address this powerful, moving memoir to “You.” Encapsulated within are Yukiko’s surviving letters, which are suffused with her stunning personality, captured as well in the author’s re-created portrait and dialogue of a woman “knocked down” by life but capable of such passionate feeling that she knocked the boy off his feet.
As startling and memorable as fiction and ripe for film adaptation.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5125-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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