An energetic memoir that captures the collision between an open-hearted iconoclast and a free-market totalitarian state.
Passionate account of an American journalist witnessing China’s pro-Western awakening and the authoritarian pushback.
Savitt, the in-house Chinese-English translator for the New York Times, opens with a dramatic tableau of his own experience in 2000 as a hunger-striking detainee. He then rewinds the narrative to his arrival in 1983 as one of China’s first cross-cultural exchange students, traveling from Duke University to Beijing Teacher’s College. He was enthralled by a society encountering its first new freedoms. “The Chinese have had every aspect of their lives dictated to them for decades,” he writes. “Now they’re collectively removing their shackles and a vibrant society is sprouting up between the cracks of grey official Communist culture.” Handling China’s still-intense restrictions with a chipper optimism, he quickly made friends in an embryonic circle of musicians, bohemians, and academics, many of whom would later gravitate toward the pro-democracy movement. Such social mixing was frowned upon by the authorities, but Savitt’s language and networking abilities advanced his journalistic career. At age 25, he became a UPI correspondent, in time to witness the infamous crackdown on the long-simmering progressive movement in Tiananmen Square, which he portrays in a grim, exciting set piece suggesting that greater brutality occurred than the West knew. Jumping forward to 1993, as online culture was just beginning, Savitt founded an unsanctioned English-language newspaper, assured by his connections that the Communist Party would take a “one eye open, one eye closed” attitude toward such a rebellious endeavor. While this proved true for a while, he was eventually arrested and treated brutally for not informing on his native-born colleagues. Savitt portrays such gritty adventures with an incongruously cheerful tone; he’s observant of every level of everyday life as China lurched toward state-monitored prosperity. Some narrative jumps lessen his tale’s overall coherence, and it ends abruptly, with Savitt unceremoniously expelled and no resolution of the newspaper’s drama.
An energetic memoir that captures the collision between an open-hearted iconoclast and a free-market totalitarian state.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59376-652-8
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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