Weaving together events she witnessed and those gleaned from her father’s papers, Law-Yone gracefully conveys the dramatic...
The life of a noted Burmese newspaper editor and activist, recounted by his daughter.
Ed Law-Yone, outspoken owner, editor and publisher of Rangoon Nation, the city’s most influential newspaper, left his writings, diaries, notes and letters to his daughter, Wendy (The Road to Wanting, 2011, etc.), hoping that she would use them to tell her family’s story. She felt daunted: “The intricacies of Burmese politics! The byzantine characters and their biblical genealogies! It would take more than a labor of love to disentangle the skeins of Dad’s narrative.” In the 20-plus years since his death in 1980, she published several novels, before the author finally felt ready to investigate her “burdensome legacy.” The result is both an intimate personal memoir and a vivid history of Myanmar, formerly Burma, during decades of roiling upheaval. Ed Law-Yone took over the Nation in 1948, just as Burma won its independence from Great Britain. Sheltered by “the cocoon” of her family, the young Wendy did not see the political chaos around her as a fragile central government was attacked on all sides by groups of insurgents. Political volatility made newsgathering exciting but dangerous; her father, she discovered, kept a loaded gun in his desk. Nevertheless, he enthusiastically embraced his position as a public figure, attending international conferences, embarking on goodwill missions around the world and forging close relationships with men in power. In 1962, however, a military coup overthrew the elected government. Although at first Ed Law-Yone felt protected by his good relationship with the new leader, Gen. Ne Win, soon his role as gadfly and muckraker was quashed—he was arrested and incarcerated for 5 years. After his release, he left the country with his family and joined other Burmese exiles abroad to mount an opposition campaign to the oppressive military government—efforts that ultimately failed.
Weaving together events she witnessed and those gleaned from her father’s papers, Law-Yone gracefully conveys the dramatic story of her youth, her family, and a remarkable man’s life and work.Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-231-16936-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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