An often harrowing, valuable account for students of daily life in the early years of the period culminating in China’s...
An early victim of Mao Zedong’s totalitarian regime is swept up in a time of terror.
“Under Mao Zedong’s dictatorship,” writes Xu, “the Chinese people had no human rights. My history is a good example of this.” So it is. By this account, which seems to have enjoyed only modest success in its Chinese edition, Xu, born in 1933, was a loyal Communist cadre who had “personally experienced the injustice and darkness of the old society.” Two events conspired to put him in the cross hairs: Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin’s legacy in the Soviet Union and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, both of which furthered Mao’s paranoia and inspired a program of constant purges. Running afoul of truer believers than he, Xu, a so-called class traitor, was sent to a labor camp in 1958, where he was beleaguered with the usual denunciations: “Your heinous crimes have caused great losses to the people!” Amazingly, he managed to escape, if only temporarily, and more than once. The path he charted each time was the most tortuous possible, intended to shake off pursuers. When, in 1972, he succeeded, he traveled from near the Burmese border to his mother’s home in Shanghai, then crossed into Mongolia, where he lived for several years in exile until, after Mao’s death, he thought it safe to return home. Xu’s narrative is of interest as a survivor’s account of the camps in those early years of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which would precede a time of famine and then the Cultural Revolution. It is of less interest as an adventure yarn, for the narrative is rather flat, without the dramatic pacing of, say, Papillon or Slavomir Rawicz’s genre-defining The Long Walk (1955).
An often harrowing, valuable account for students of daily life in the early years of the period culminating in China’s little-documented civil war of the 1970s.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-21262-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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