A finely worded memoir of coming to terms with a Japanese heritage, by a Japanese-American who's a community-college counselor in Seattle. ``Feudal Japan floats around my mother,'' Minatoya writes. ``It followed her into our American home and governed my girlhood life....In that feudal code, all females were silent and yielding.'' But Minatoya is an American brought up on ``iconoclastic choice and irrepressible hope,'' uncomfortable with ``being in-between.'' Here, her spiritual journey begins with memories of growing up in Albany in the 1950's and of the tragic figure of a grandmother she knew only from one photograph. Her mother's mother had been divorced, ``banished'' from her samurai- descended family, and separated permanently from her children—the price of having a love affair. From Boston, where the author had a ``tenure track contract'' at an unnamed university, Minatoya takes us on her travels ``in the disguise of a soul unfettered by convention'' to Japan and China (she taught in both countries), and finally to Nepal. What will leave an impression with readers are the fragmentary accounts of her family's experiences. Her immigrant father in Washington State, for instance, made his way from being a ``child servant'' who ``cooked and cleaned and tended the cool long lawn that sloped away from the big house like a dowager's ample evening skirt'' to being a research scientist. And unforgettable is the revelation that Minatoya's grandmother tried to poison her children when she was condemned to separation (``murder-suicide was considered an honorable act''). One can't help compare this to In the Realm of a Dying Emperor (p. 981), in which Norma Field uses her Japanese-American bicultural perspective to penetrate some of the struggles of contemporary Japan. Minatoya, though eloquent and sometimes moving, only flags along on the steep path of introspection.
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-016809-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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
PERSPECTIVES
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