In this slim volume, historian of China Spence (Yale; The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds, 1998, etc.) offers a biography of one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic personages. Mao Zedong was born in 1893, as the last imperial dynasty of China was approaching its demise, and died in 1976, as a powerful communist China was entering dÇtente with the US. Between these dates lies a complex and convoluted history that Mao both shaped and was shaped by. Born in relative comfort in rural China, Mao was a diffident student but a voracious reader. He became involved in the many struggles and movements to unite China and free it from Western domination. He came to communism only incrementally and seems to have been more of a liberal as a young man, for instance, as an early defender of women’s rights. Nor was his rise in the Communist Party preordained: he was too nonconformist, his views too unorthodox, especially on the need for rural revolution. Yet by at least the 1940s, Mao was the undisputed leader of the party and thus of China. Mao’s leadership was, as Spence notes, “a long-drawn-out adventure in upheaval.” Increasingly cut off from day-to-day reality, with few if any checks on his power, during the 1950s and “60s, Mao launched China onto one disastrous project after another. Spence does an admirable job of placing Mao in history, but it’s the private man with whom he is most concerned. Aided by many newly available sources, especially correspondence Mao wrote throughout his lifetime, Spence creates a Mao both wise and foolish, cruel and romantic, pragmatic and naive. Yet Mao’s deepest motivations remain elusive, the origins of his megalomania a mystery. Perhaps Mao had created a self that even he could not control or even truly understand. While much is left out here, this is a fine introduction to the mystery of Mao.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88669-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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