A disquieting reminder of the old maxim, “The dead can’t answer back.”
An attempt to explain a friend’s baffling suicide.
Bestselling author Iris Chang was just 36 when she committed suicide—a fact which, perhaps even more than most suicides, surprised everyone who knew her. In the years prior to her death, Chang had written three highly acclaimed books, including 1997’s The Rape of Nanking, a story of Japanese atrocities in China which reopened heated dialogue around the world. She was happily married with a charming two-year-old son, and was, says Kamen, “the most envied, and enviable, person I knew. She achieved success, by all possible external measures, to the extreme and to an almost farcical extent…She was beautiful. She was thin.” Yet on November 9, 2004, Chang drove to a remote road, parked her car and shot herself in the head. Kamen (All in my Head: An Epic Quest to Cure an Unrelenting, Totally Unreasonable, and Only Slightly Enlightening Headache, 2005, etc.), who met Chang when the two were in college, when Chang was already an ambitious young reporter, was first driven to write an article about Chang’s death for Salon.com, and then, faced with waves of e-mails from readers asking the same questions she had about the death, the book. “I wondered if this was amoral, exploiting a friend’s tragic case for a book and possibly upsetting her grieving family,” she writes. “With some sensitivity, maybe I could be only minimally amoral.” To that end, the author is partially successful. Kamen dutifully delves into the larger issues of suicide and mental illness in Asian-American communities, and into the peculiar immigrant drive to succeed that seized Chang so forcefully at such a young age. She also brutally reports each way she feels that she might have betrayed her friend—including a devastating passage in which Kamen recounts ignoring Chang’s phone calls in the days prior to her suicide, and then reveals that one of the points in Chang’s “twenty-point plan to get Iris well” had been to “call friends—as a source of support.” Kamen draws an intriguing portrait of an enormously ambitious woman who appears to have worked very hard to craft her own image, and Chang herself haunts the book in the form of italicized letters and e-mails to friends and family. Yet the sense of invading a troubled woman’s privacy is hard to escape.
A disquieting reminder of the old maxim, “The dead can’t answer back.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-306-81466-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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