Lively, evocative autobiographical essays.
Focusing Proust-like on the objects that embody memories, Lighte (Pieces of China, 2009) hosts a tour of his life, from an American Jewish upbringing to a career in China and London.
Lighte, a longtime Sinophile and J.P. Morgan banker, exploits both meanings of the title by taking on the role of solicitous tour guide—“As a hospitable host in this room, I will give a guided tour of its interior”—while curating his impressively detailed memories like precious artifacts. Lighte grew up in Florida but, after his parents’ divorce, moved with his mother to New York City. It was a family of feuds and sudden deaths, and his mother suffered periodic depressions. By contrast, Lighte was a clownish child who told off-color jokes and played the recorder with his nose. He was an aimless student until he took a college elective on the Far East, hoping for an education on the Vietnam War. This one happenstance determined much of his future: studying Chinese in Taiwan, teaching English in Tokyo, working in Beijing, connecting with his husband over A Night at the Chinese Opera, and adopting two Chinese daughters. In brief vignettes, some almost Proustian in their evocation of sense memories, Lighte remembers people and places that hold significance for him. For instance, in “The Gardenia Bush” and “The Lilac Quest,” a flower’s scent takes him back to the past. A whiff of gardenia perfume in China, and he’s in a friend’s Miami Beach yard, while the smell of lilacs reminds him of the desperate hunt for a floral gift for Aunt Marcy’s surprise party. Other objects are nearly as totemic—red plates purchased for Uncle David’s shiva, a last-minute passport obtained before a QE2 voyage with his father, or the store-bought cookies he took to AIDS patients in memory of a departed friend. His meetings with Pearl Buck and Nigel Nicolson are highlights and reinforce the subtitle’s delight in historical serendipity. Meanwhile, “Seder in Kensington” is the best example of Lighte bringing disparate elements of his life together.
Lively, evocative autobiographical essays.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0991252978
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Acausal Books
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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