A blend of family history and world history that starts out strong—the Russian years are by far the most compelling—but runs...
The life of a Russian grandmother, a woman in the wrong places at the wrong times.
Using family memorabilia, the recollections of friends and relatives, plus newspaper files and historical archives, British journalist Williams (Hongkong Bank, 1989, etc.) has pieced together a large portion of the life of her grandmother, Olga Yunter, who was born in 1890 in Siberia and died in 1973 in England. The homely details of life in Siberia in the early-20th-century fill the first chapters, but WWII and the Russian Revolution brought uncertainty, death and chaos, changing Olga’s life forever. After two of her brothers were killed in 1919, her father gave her a handful of rubies and gold nuggets to sew into her clothing, put her on a horse and sent her east to Vladivostok. Within a few months she was on the run again, this time to Tientsin, China, a city filled with Russian refugees also fleeing from the Reds. There, she learned English, and in 1923 married a young Englishman, Fred Edney, thereby gaining a certain security. Olga began transforming herself into a proper English housewife, one who was not, however, quite acceptable to Fred’s family back in England. Home leaves, granted every five years by Fred’s employer, were disappointing affairs. Still, life in the European sectors of Tientsin and later Shanghai was comfortable and relatively safe until 1940, when Japan signed a military alliance with Italy and Germany. Staying in China then became too dangerous, and once again, Olga was on the run, this time to Canada, where friends had offered refuge. The author gives scant coverage to the WWII years, to Olga’s 1945 reunion with her husband, interned by the Japanese, or to their subsequent life in Shanghai. By 1948, Communist forces were advancing, and Olga and her husband again fled, eventually finding sanctuary in England.
A blend of family history and world history that starts out strong—the Russian years are by far the most compelling—but runs out of steam long before Olga does.Pub Date: June 21, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50851-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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