Engaging bits about intriguing lands, all in service of trying to “understand the complexities of the world.”
An American expatriate now living in Singapore explores the world between and beyond borders, where the notion of nationalism becomes complicated.
As the author of a dozen or so books and an academic within a number of writing programs, Hemley (A Field Guide for Immersion Writing, 2012, etc.) has crossed the borders between fiction and nonfiction and established himself as an internationalist. His latest is a travel book of sorts but not one aimed at tourists. In “Mr. Chen’s Mountain,” the author invokes an old saying: “If you spend a day in China you can write a book; if you spend a month, you can write an article; if you spend a year, you can’t write anything.” This chapter, one of the book’s most provocative and engaging, chronicles the story of a megawealthy man whose character and wealth resist easy understanding or categorization. The author compares his subject to both Citizen Kane and Jed Clampett, but with a twist on the latter. “What makes him remarkable is that he’s not the Jed Clampett who moved to Beverly Hills but the [one] who returned home,” where his wealth towers in stark contrast to the poverty he left behind. Because many of the chapters were previously published—in the New York Observer, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere—the narrative doesn’t always cohere, and some of the complexities of border rivalries and histories can be difficult to apprehend quickly. However, this may be an element of Hemley’s overall theme about how lands can change allegiances and alliances many times without the natives themselves changing. “Governments are necessary, and it’s natural to want to consider oneself part of something larger,” he writes. “But I’ve never been fully convinced that nations as such make sense.” Among other topics, the author explores the Falkland Islands, Hong Kong, and the fraught border between India and Bangladesh.
Engaging bits about intriguing lands, all in service of trying to “understand the complexities of the world.”Pub Date: March 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4962-2041-7
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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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