A best-seller in Japan, and soon to be a movie, Japanese writer Ishikawa's book about his mid-60's California sojourn is full of those tiresome generalities that hinder rather than help international understanding. Fresh out of high school, Ishikawa came to America to live with his oldest brother, Anchan, a farmer. He planned to attend a local high school to improve his English and then proceed to college. While he did this, he would work on the farm with his brother and earn his keep. And so he does, but the America he has read about and the America his brother has described are very different from reality. Like all immigrants, he is soon aware of the inevitable gap between his native past, with all its rooted associations and history, and his more nebulous immigrant status. As he picks strawberries with migrant Mexican workers, meets the local Japanese, attends school, has an affair with an older Japanese woman who had married an American, and travels, he comments confidently on what he perceives to be the differences between the two countries. Unlike in Japan, he finds American conversations are one-sided; Americans tackle problems head-on; and American constantly fight for justice. Less persuasive are his analyses: people without credit cards are rejected by society; the country is idealistic because immigrant men came here first, then summoned their women; and all American behavior is shaped by growing up in a ``jostling immigrant society where everyone is a talker.'' Ishikawa's vignettes of Japanese immigrant life are valuable, as are his opinions about Japan, but sweeping and simplistic statements about American life and history seriously undermine his book.
Pub Date: April 1, 1991
ISBN: 4-7700-1551-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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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