Not as smooth or consistently engaging as his first two books, but worthwhile reading for armchair travelers and Sinophiles.
The roving journalist and travel writer takes on China.
In his previous two books—Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu (2006) and The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific (2004)—Troost chronicled his time on the tiny, isolated islands of the South Pacific. Here, the author considers a decidedly different environment, a “massive and rapidly changing…vast and complex country.” That description proves to be an understatement, as he encounters one bewildering thing after another, from the “hermetically sealed Super Deluxe Executive Suite” at the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, the world’s highest hotel, to rampant prostitution and unspeakably foul restroom conditions. “It is remarkable,” he writes, “how quickly a country like China can reduce a foreigner—this foreigner, in any case—to a state of childlike powerlessness.” As Troost travels through Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao, Guangzhou and a half dozen other teeming cities, he notices the pervasive remnants of the Cultural Revolution, as well as the driving force behind the new “Chinese Model” for organizing society: “unfettered capitalism combined with authoritarian rule.” With the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, the author notes, comes a widening gap between the rich and the poor—the government is currently sitting on a $1.4 trillion reserve—in addition to increasing levels of air and water pollution, which Troost duly notes in each impossibly smog-choked city. The author finds relief in the relative order of Hong Kong, the utter barrenness of the Taklamakan Desert, the quiet calm of Lhasa (Tibet) and the staggering beauty of Tiger Leaping Gorge, but he is underwhelmed by the fabled Shangri-la. Interspersing sections of cultural history—and plenty of tasty and not-so-tasty culinary tidbits—throughout his travelogue, Troost offers a serviceable primer on life in China. But uncharacteristically awkward prose too often creeps into the narrative, and the author relies heavily on bland generalizations (“It’s a complicated country, China, full of complicated people”) in lieu of thoughtful commentary.
Not as smooth or consistently engaging as his first two books, but worthwhile reading for armchair travelers and Sinophiles.Pub Date: July 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2200-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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