A graceful, gently told narrative of contentment and resilience.
A graphic memoir recounts a quiet life amid cultural upheaval.
Pingru, 95, makes his literary debut with a charming memoir illustrated with his own evocative watercolors, chronicling his life in China from 1923 to 2008, the year his beloved wife died. The son of a lawyer, the author grew up in a close-knit family that valued tradition. Throughout the year, his parents, siblings, and assorted relatives gathered to celebrate the seasons and various festivals, pay respects to ancestors and gods, and share special foods. When he was 18, he was accepted into a military academy, eager to join the fight against the Japanese. By the time World War II ended, he had risen to first lieutenant. The most significant event in his life was his marriage to Mao Meitang in 1948. Although the union was arranged by their families, the two had known each other as children and were delighted with the match. Now responsible for a wife, Pingru decided to return to civilian life, though he was unsure about his new path. He learned bookkeeping, tried—and failed—to set up a noodle shop, and settled in Shanghai, where he found two jobs, as a hospital accountant and editor. Everything changed for the worse in 1958, when, caught in the Cultural Revolution, the author was sent to do “Reeducation Through Labor” in a province far from Shanghai. Meitang and their five children were left to eke out a living without him. “The whole family was stigmatized,” he writes. The author does not dwell on the hardship of those 20 years but instead focuses on how he coped: by memorizing sentences in English to occupy his mind during “unskilled and primitive” labor; by learning to play the violin on Sunday, “a rest day”; and by trips home once a year at the Chinese New Year. “For ordinary people like us,” he writes, “life is made up of numbers of small details” that become “treasured memories.”
A graceful, gently told narrative of contentment and resilience.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-87149-2
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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