A polished account that segues elegantly from a personal saga to a larger cultural history.
Two British journalists chronicle an affecting, bittersweet romance that began during the Russo-Japanese War.
The long relationship between Arthur Hart-Synnot, a British career officer, and Masa Suzuki, a Tokyo barber’s daughter, finally came to light after a cache of letters between the lovers was discovered in 1982. (A book delineating their romance was published in Japanese in 1998.) They met in Tokyo in 1904. Fresh from the Boer War, 32-year-old Arthur, eldest son of Irish landowners, had been sent to Japan to learn the language and attempt to forge a new alliance with this mysterious little nation that had dared to stand up to mighty Russia. Arthur met 25-year-old Masa at the Officers’ Club, where she worked as a clerk; he was immediately smitten, and she was pleased to be listened to and treated as an equal. (Japanese society expected women to be submissive and obedient.) Masa helped Arthur with his Japanese, and when he offered to hire her as a housekeeper, she managed to gain her brothers’ permission, even though it was clear that “there would be more to this role than housekeeping and language practice.” They had two sons and maintained loyal relations over many years, writing copious letters during Arthur’s postings to Manchuria, Hong Kong and Burma. Though he asked Masa to marry him and come to England, she would not. Sent into the thick of fighting in France at the outbreak of WWI, Arthur lost both legs. He gave up the idea of returning to Japan and married an English nurse who had cared for him. Masa felt furious and betrayed, but Arthur continued to write and send money until WWII made it impossible. Their surviving son, Kiyoshi, had a poignant reunion with his elderly father in 1939. Arthur died in 1942, Kiyoshi in a Soviet prison camp in 1945; Masa lived until 1965.
A polished account that segues elegantly from a personal saga to a larger cultural history.Pub Date: June 19, 2006
ISBN: 1-59420-089-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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