Probing human-interest stories that mine the heart of today’s China.
A study of vastly changing China from the perspective of one busy street in the center of Shanghai.
In his deliberative, observant journalistic style, Schmitz, the China correspondent for the public radio program Marketplace, chronicles his interviews and friendships with several of the shop owners on the street where he has lived for some years, plumbing their dreams and capitalist motivations. Once part of the French Concession, a haven for foreigners, lined by a luxuriant alley of London plane trees, the so-called Street of Eternal Happiness is a narrow two-way thoroughfare where “vehicular pandemonium” invites survival of the fittest on the road between masses of provincial migrants and sophisticated urbanites. All of the entrepreneurs Schmitz befriended have navigated “the system.” There’s CK, the young owner of “2nd Floor Your Sandwich” shop, who was a musician as a kid and now sells accordions to pay the bills; and Zhao Shiling, who runs the lively corner flower shop and has a mighty tale of woe and survival about leaving a “useless” husband back home in Shandong province and taking control of propelling her two sons to future prosperity. With each chapter, Schmitz delves deeply into the families’ endurance through the Cultural Revolution and famine and current drive to better themselves, sparked by the economic flourishing of the mid-1990s. Many of the author’s acquaintances were determined to strive and even get rich—e.g., the risky investments of Auntie Fu, the disputatious wife of the Shanghai-born pancake seller Uncle Feng. Moreover, Schmitz explores some of the current Chinese fads and phenomena, such as the underground lure of Christianity, the fastest-growing religion in China; the resurgence of Buddhism; the shocking demolition of neighboring Maggie Lane to make way for Shanghai’s world fair of 2010; and the baneful task of finding a suitable wife.
Probing human-interest stories that mine the heart of today’s China.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-41808-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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