A captivating and inspiring immigration story.
In this debut biography, a Vietnamese woman escapes her authoritarian country with her family to become an entrepreneurial success in the United States.
Many years ago, Hieu Vo knew that she couldn’t continue to live in Communist-controlled Vietnam—the government ruled its citizens with fear and relentless indoctrination, and she wanted a better life for her kids. Her husband, Tien, once an aspiring lawyer, was singled out by the government as suspicious and sent to work a menial job outside of Saigon as part of a plan to break his spirit. Hieu’s mother, Thi Ba, organized an escape for Hieu and her family by boat; Thi traded gold on the black market, which was an invaluable commodity after the national currency collapsed, and so she was plugged into the world of illicit exchange. But Hieu and her family were soon captured and sent to languish in prison, and author Driver captures her terrifying experience in unflinching prose: “she watched her children suffering in the environment. They became skinnier and skinnier, weaker and weaker. Khoa and Gialai grew so weak, they even lost their desire to be children.” After the family was finally released, Hieu immediately began planning a second escape attempt while waiting for her malnourished children’s strength to return. They finally made it by boat to Hong Kong, and then to America, where Hieu was known as “Charlie” and trained to become a manicurist. She eventually opened her own shop, ManTrap, which became a successful chain. Driver’s engrossing biography relates a remarkable series of accomplishments, conveying them in cinematically dramatic terms and highlighting Hieu’s indomitable spirit. Along the way, she deftly shares the history of the manicure industry, as well, showing how it became a support system for many Asian refugees and sometimes dealt with raids by government inspectors. Overall, Driver’s account is affecting and instructive throughout.
A captivating and inspiring immigration story.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-626-8
Page Count: 203
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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