Bass writes himself into the story too much, but the intriguing character of An provides the center of a fascinating account.
Swiftly paced narrative of a Vietnamese James Bond who worked both sides of the game.
Bass (English and Journalism/Univ. of Albany; The Predictors, 1999, etc.), whose 1996 book Vietnamerica concerned Amerasian children of the Vietnam War, returns to Indochina to flesh out a story he wrote for the New Yorker a few years ago. His subject, a former Reuters and Time correspondent named Pham Xuan An, proved to be a lively, often prickly interlocutor. He had received official clearance for the magazine piece, but he still knew things that no one else was supposed to know—most likely why the man known as Agent Z.21 chose not to speak on the record for the book. The result is “the unauthorized biography of a spy,” Bass writes. An, the author reveals, was renowned for his skills as a reporter and writer—but also as a storyteller capable of spinning entertaining yarns over a hotel bar for hours on end. He was also famed, among certain compatriots, for endlessly detailed reports that made Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap “clap their hands with glee and exclaim over the verve and narrative grip of the Tolstoy in their midst.” It was An, for instance, who revealed to Hanoi information that American ground forces were first on their way to Vietnam. “This would not be the only time that Pham Xuan An got a scoop from Time long before the magazine’s readers back in the United States,” writes Bass. An saved the lives of several fellow journalists, though, including Robert Sam Anson. At the end of the war, he put his family on helicopters leaving Saigon for American ships offshore, then gladly greeted the Communist liberators—though he had to serve time in a reeducation camp simply for having been tainted by contact with the West.
Bass writes himself into the story too much, but the intriguing character of An provides the center of a fascinating account.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58648-409-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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