An affectionate glimpse at the worlds of Japan and Zen. Chadwick began his formal Zen training in San Francisco in 1966. In his first book, he gives us an account of his four years in Japan as a Zen student and English teacher, beginning in April 1988, when he was 43. He spent the first six weeks in a small, remote mountain temple. Then he settled down next to a large suburban temple (he doesn't say exactly where) and soon afterward married his American girlfriend, Elin. Prefacing each short chapter with the appropriate date and location, Chadwick moves backward and forward between his secluded monastic practice and his lay Zen practice in an often chaotic domestic setting. The result is at times confusing, but the contrast between the two serves to hold the reader's interest and even acts as a kind of koan, forcing us to ask what spiritual activity really is. We meet Norman, a fellow American Zen monk who continually (and unsuccessfully) battles to convert his fiery temperament into detached compassion in his collisions with Japanese attitudes. We share Chadwick and his wife's brushes with government bureaucrats dealing with their not- quite-legal immigration status. We join Chadwick, Norman, and the other monks on a takuhatsu, or formal begging trip. Throughout, Chadwick writes with humor and insight. He deftly portrays the different American and Japanese mentalities, for example, in his hilarious description of his interview for a driver's license, during which he was asked (among other things) the exact score of his written driving test and the rank of the official who administered it. The death and funeral of Chadwick's friend, Zen master Katagiri Roshi, dominates the final chapters, and the sudden need to vacate his apartment brings Chadwick's happy existence in Japan to an unexpected and Zen-like conclusion. Japanese and Zen terms are explained in a helpful glossary. Vivid, lighthearted, and unself-consciously profound.
Pub Date: Aug. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-14-019457-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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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