by Rowan Callick ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 17, 2013
Fascinating glimpses inside the frustrating machinery of power in China.
An Australian journalist probes the perplexing presence of the Chinese state in all aspects of Chinese life and culture.
For all that China has transformed itself over the last 30 years, the more it has stayed the same, as Callick finds in this engaging look around the “screened scenery” of the political system. Although the Chinese Communist Party is no longer run by a personality like Mao or Deng, the tentacles of power and control can still be felt in all aspects of Chinese life. While the rest of the world has been assuming that China’s growing middle class, the result of its recent spectacular economic surge, will naturally demand greater liberties and freedoms that the West takes for granted, that has not been the case. In fact, writes Callick, that successful middle class, bolstered by its ties to an all-pervasive state, has grown increasingly nationalistic and not timid about adopting traditional Chinese values, such as those propounded by Confucius, as a way to balance Western bias against China. A strong state is viewed as the country’s success. The state has generated the country’s enormous prosperity, modernity and wealth, and joining the party from an early age means tapping into a network of career opportunities, as the author shows through interviews with various members. The network is controlled from top to bottom, and participants are willing and well-compensated. “Reforms” take place strictly within the one-party system, where there is no separation of powers or self-criticism. It is a mind-boggling modus operandi, but the Chinese will keep it this way, until they don’t.
Fascinating glimpses inside the frustrating machinery of power in China.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-137-27885-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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