Elicits smiles for the author’s self-awareness—and winces for his lack of it.
A translator of Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, documentary filmmaker, writer and academic summarizes and assesses his peripatetic life.
Beginning with his departure from Tucson, Ariz., to enter Harvard University in the late 1950s and ending with his ascent last year of Takao Mountain, Nathan (Japanese Cultural Studies/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation’s Quest for Pride and Purpose, 2004, etc.) is not always a likable narrator. He can be charming and self-deprecating: He tells delightful stories about his failures in Hollywood, including some humiliating encounters with producer Irwin Allen and an ominous one with O.J. Simpson, whose “savage power under tenuous control” Nathan noted. He can also, perhaps intentionally, reveal a porcine profile. He writes about his pricey homes, his large salaries and royalties for various projects (including commercials for AT&T), his youthful boorishness in Japanese bars, his situational ethics and his inappropriate relationships with young female students early in his career. He charts the courses of two marriages and describes the difficulties of long separations from his wife and children mandated by his various professional projects. Nathan also reveals an ego in need of trimming. He felt insufficiently celebrated at Oe’s Nobel ceremony; he faults an associate for the financial failure of a film business; he delights in quoting flattering letters and comments, especially from celebrities; he wonders if translation is an art, too. Despite all these disagreeable qualities, his memoir contains numerous pleasurable passages. The accounts of his ongoing struggles to understand the Japanese, his amusing description of a softball game with Saul Bellow (who comes off as even more boorish than Nathan) and his misery and self-flagellation after the dissolution of his first marriage reveal a capacious heart and mind concealed beneath a carapace of crassness and self-regard.
Elicits smiles for the author’s self-awareness—and winces for his lack of it.Pub Date: March 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5345-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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