A genial, informative chronicle of the hopes and dreams of a Chinese immigrant.
A Chinese teenager’s saga immigrating from Eastern China to Italy.
Funded by the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship and intrigued by migrant behavior (particularly the Europe-bound emigration patterns of her husband’s birthplace of Qingtian), journalist Ma’s fieldwork charts the course of a Chinese immigrant’s journey from Qingtian to Venice. Drawn to “characters who seem a little out of place,” Toronto-born Ma relocated to Qingtian in 2011 and was captivated by fast-talking teen Ye Pei’s story. When Ma first began their informational interviews, Pei’s mother had been in Italy for half a decade already, and the girl was determined to join her. Culled from interviews and diary entries, the author vividly reconstructs Pei’s life beginning with her long days laboring with limited Italian vocabulary in northeastern Solesino, two hours away from Venice’s picturesque canals, where she’d originally dreamed of settling abroad. As she expands her research with profiles of other hardworking immigrants and a particularly atmospheric tour of France, searching for a Qingtian connection, Ma depicts the determined immigrant experience from both a historical perspective and from effective firsthand accounts. She documents widespread xenophobia from the influx of Far East immigrants to Europe and reaches back to Pei’s Chinese childhood to the day her mother left for Europe and joined a migration that’s been a behavioral staple in China for centuries. Once reunited with her mother and beginning employment on a mushroom farm with the rest of her family, Pei admitted to harboring impressive ambitions far beyond farmwork, taking night classes to “learn about workplace safety, food safety, and hygiene.” A sensitive writer, Ma expertly channels the yearning and base desires of her subjects through intimate conversation and cultural analysis in a narrative full of genuine compassion and appreciation.
A genial, informative chronicle of the hopes and dreams of a Chinese immigrant.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4422-3936-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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