A curious insider work, so self-engrossed that it neglects to impart a larger picture.
An extremely close—indeed, hermetically sealed—second-hand look inside 17th-century China.
This intimate study by Spence (History/Yale; Treason by the Book, 2001, etc.) involves the life and work of aristocratic Chinese scholar Zhang Dai, from the prosperous east coast town of Shaoxing. Zhang found his life’s mission in recording the history of the stylish Ming dynasty, which had been in place 229 years by the time he was born in 1597 but would be eclipsed by Manchu invaders in 1644. At the same time that the dynasty was enjoying its apogee in intellectual, philosophical and aesthetic developments, Zhang’s family was moving from the country to the city, enjoying pleasures of the lantern arts, music clubs, cock-fighting and brothel hopping, among others. Hailing from a line of scholars, Zhang did not pass his provincial exams, but devoted himself to a life of reading and pleasures. By 1616 he had married Lady Liu, by whom he had many children. His first works were a list of compact biographical studies, Profiles of Righteous and Honorable People Through the Ages and Ice Mountain, an operatic play that dramatized the rise and fall of the eunuch Wei Zhongxian, who had taken over the reigns of Ming rule under Tianqi. Following insurrection by Manchu troops, Beijing was seized and Zhang’s family scattered. In hungry exile, he wrote his rueful Dream Recollections, drawing solace from Chinese poet Tao Qian and biographies of his family members. The final end of the Ming dynasty enabled Zhang to complete The Stone Casket and its sequel, which brought him some renown later in life. The problem here is that his life is recorded second-hand, as a paraphrase largely drained of energy. Spence might have served the reader better by giving an accessible translation of Zhang’s own aphoristic words.
A curious insider work, so self-engrossed that it neglects to impart a larger picture.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-670-06357-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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