A rich portrait of a brutal age.
Biography of an African slave who rose to fame and fortune in 16th-century Japan.
Making his literary debut, Lockley (Nihon Univ. College of Law) teams up with Girard (Mary Rose, 2018, etc.) to create a fast-paced, novelistic history of Japan’s feudal past, centered on the life of Yasuke, who arrived in Japan in 1579 as the indentured bodyguard and valet of Alessandro Valignano, a wealthy and influential Portuguese Jesuit missionary. Drawing on abundant sources, including archival material, the authors offer a panoramic view of politics, sex, religion, and war. They recount in horrifying detail the massacre of African families and kidnapping of boys by Arab, Persian, and Indian slave merchants that resulted in Yasuke’s enslavement. Growing up in India as a boy soldier, he was “trained in violence, as well as comportment and service,” making him an appealing servant for the Jesuits, who fanned out across Japan, determined to save souls. Over six feet tall, strong and muscular, Yasuke was an intimidating presence and protector as the Jesuits battled religious and political factions in a nation beset by endlessly warring factions. Blood and gore ooze from the pages as the authors describe ruthless slaughter, beheadings, disembowelment, rapes, and torture. Ninjas, who “killed only for money, and had no honor beyond what they were paid,” were hardly the most vicious, and Yasuke proved himself a valiant fighter. Seeking favor with the mighty warlord Oda Nobunaga, Valignano handed over Yasuke as “a weapon bearer and novelty.” Delighted, the warlord awarded Yasuke the elite status of samurai. “You are my black warrior,” Nobunaga proclaimed. “The demon who will ride beside me into battle, the dark angel who protects me and my family.” Because black skin, although unusual in Japan at the time, carried “entirely positive” connotations, Yasuke became revered, and his prowess became legendary. “People in the streets did not only gape at him,” the authors write, “they bowed, heads to the earth, as they addressed him.”
A rich portrait of a brutal age.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-335-14102-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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