Brief biographies of five Japanese women who challenged national mores and cultural expectations in the years before WWII. Novelist Birnbaum (An Eastern Tradition, 1980) is an American fluent in Japanese (she also translated one of her subjects— novels, Uno Chiyo’s Confessions of Love) and familiar with Japanese ways. Two of these studies were undertaken as assignments for the New Yorker. Astounded by the complex, self-contradictory lives of these women, Birnbaum found herself “left with only the humble feeling that the truth about another person is as hard to grasp as a single autumn leaf rushing down a swollen river.” Her subjects are artistic and intense: actress Matsui Sumako, who brought Ibsen’s Nora and Wilde’s Salome to the Japanese stage but hanged herself after her married lover’s suicide; painter Takamura Chieko, whose husband immortalized her in poetry after she was institutionalized for mental illness; poet Yanagiwara Byakuren, high-born and beautiful, who divorced her wealthy husband via a public pronouncement in a newspaper and went to live with a younger, poorer lover; the popular novelist Uno, who had a multiplicity of husbands and lovers and wrote all about them; and contemporary film actress Takamine Hideko, who began her career as a child star in the 1920s and continued in popular Japanese films until the late 1970s. All of these subjects represented Japan’s first thrust at freedom for women, although none saw themselves as feminists. Birnbaum captures their individualism, which she sets in the restrained and disciplined context of Japanese society at the time. Curiously involving miniatures of five brave women who confronted, but did not always overcome, rigid social barriers. (5 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-231-11356-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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