A heartfelt and moving tale, coupling insights into two remarkably different cultures with a love story that, as much as any...
A writer goes to the far side of the world for work and finds a home.
In May 2004, Slater parlayed a position teaching writing to graduate students in Boston into a job teaching English as a second language in Kobe, Japan. She began working as a member of the faculty of the East Asia Executive MBA Program, and any hard-earned confidence she had gained working in Boston quickly vanished. Shortly into the program, Slater was asked to talk to students more quietly and be more demure, “like women here are supposed to.” Despite this—or perhaps because of it—the author found a kindred spirit, of sorts, in a student named Toru. They fell quickly and deeply in love, a storybook-romance sort of love, in which they realized immediately that they were meant to meet and be together, despite the odds of it happening. The relationship grew, carried forward by their learning to communicate with each other. Then they were split apart when Toru left to be with his mother, who was critically injured by a hit-and-run driver and died a short time later. The book truly finds its legs when the couple reunites in America, as Slater chronicles how she began to acclimate to Toru’s country. Her eyes opened to the many the things she’d become inured to in America and the beauty of simple differences in Japan. With her mother cautioning her against it, her own roots in Massachusetts, and her heart pulling her across the globe, Slater had to decide whether—and how—to try and make it work. The author certainly makes the telling of it work.
A heartfelt and moving tale, coupling insights into two remarkably different cultures with a love story that, as much as any true love story can, delivers a happy ending.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-16620-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
PERSPECTIVES
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