A worthy addition to the immigrant bookshelf. Though targeted at the Christian market, the book should have wider appeal.
With assistance from Downs (Wonders Never Cease, 2010, etc.), dermatologist Chung chronicles his family's flight from communist rule in Vietnam to their subsequent life in America.
The author describes his experiences beginning in 1978, when he was 3 and arrived in Arkansas, one of eight children in a destitute refugee family that “went to sleep in one world and woke up in another.” In Vietnam, his father managed his family's merchant empire in the Mekong Delta. As ethnic Chinese, they maintained traditional Asian values. His parents, whose marriage had been arranged, lived with their extended family in a compound, and his widowed grandmother controlled the money with an iron fist. Despite their great wealth, his mother was consigned to a life little better than that of a servant, while his father maintained a mistress. After the revolution, Chung’s parents and their children were part of the legendary exodus of the boat people. The author provides a harrowing account of their desperate escape and rescue at sea. Left adrift on the ocean by Malaysians who refused them refuge, the nearly 100 people on board were at the point of death by dehydration. Miraculously, they survived against the odds and were picked up by a boat on the lookout for boat people needing assistance. With the help of The World Vision National Leadership Council, the family received asylum in America. Chung tells of his father's uncomplaining struggle to support his family by working on a factory assembly line while raising his children in a culture whose ways and language were foreign to him. Like many children of immigrants, the author faced racism and discrimination, yet he achieved academic success at Harvard, pursued a distinguished career and “became more American than many who were born here.”
A worthy addition to the immigrant bookshelf. Though targeted at the Christian market, the book should have wider appeal.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8499-4756-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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