Part travel diary, part spiritual education, liberally sprinkled with hedonistic pursuits.
Olden recalls his time as a young man in tumultuous China.
Olden’s memoir opens with his decision to leave behind everything he’d known and join his friend Alex in Shanghai. The year was 1999, and China was buzzing with possibility. The country’s vast economic expansion was underway in earnest, and opportunities were everywhere. Olden left his former life after his fiancee cheated on him with a close friend, and then he chose not to pursue serious relationships with women. So, instead of romance, the story is full of camaraderie between men—particularly after Olden finds a steady, entertaining group of friends—and fleeting interactions with women. He encountered female scam artists, sex workers and business owners (not to mention the extensive collection of digital women he kept on his computer). As Olden went from job to job, scraping by when one position ended and rent was due, he started to gain confidence in himself. A pivotal moment was his meeting Joseph, a former Mormon missionary living in Shanghai who radiated calm from the moment he met Olden. In their first encounter, Joseph gave him a book—Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist—which Olden accepted with some trepidation. As it happened, Joseph’s book allowed Olden to relax and go with the flow of life. This strategy ended up working well for him on the employment front, as he found himself with opportunity after opportunity even when things seemed desperate. Romance wasn’t in the cards for Olden, though he does describe sometimes-amusing, usually vulgar encounters with women from bars and clubs. The memoir traces Olden’s evolution: Readers see him through the process of moving to a foreign country and becoming more of a stable, optimistic adult. The cast, mostly friends and short-term lovers, is vividly portrayed, and Olden writes everyday speech particularly well, helping readers more fully experience his daily life in Shanghai. However, as an effect of culture shock, some dialogue is intentionally unclear, since Olden had difficulty understanding Shanghai’s residents even when they spoke English. From the food carts outside Olden’s first office to descriptions of nightlife, there is more than enough local color to satisfy readers interested in armchair travel. While Olden’s memoir doesn’t have a plot in the traditional sense, his own development touches on milestones and themes that progress throughout the work, giving readers plenty to think about.
Part travel diary, part spiritual education, liberally sprinkled with hedonistic pursuits.Pub Date: June 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497505636
Page Count: 376
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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