A beautiful and poignant memoir demonstrating perseverance and the power of art.
The artist and social activist explores his father’s turbulent relationship with the early Communist regime and his own struggle for creative freedom.
Spurred by his imprisonment in 2011 for “economic crimes” against the authoritarian Chinese government, Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) uses his father’s heartbreakingly difficult life as a point of departure to tell his own story. Born in 1910, just as the Qing dynasty was collapsing, Ai Qing was part of the new idealistic proletariat, trained as an artist and schooled for a year in Paris before taking his place as part of the increasingly ideological cultural force in the new Communist China. But Mao Zedong unleashed waves of political upheaval, and just when the author was born, Ai Qing was exiled during the so-called Anti-Rightist campaign. Most miserably, during the Cultural Revolution, father and sons were sent to “Little Siberia,” on the edge of the Gurbantünggüt Desert, where they lived in “a square hole dug into the ground, with a crude roof formed of tamarisk branches and rice stalks, sealed with several layers of grassy mud.” Still, his father’s indomitable spirit remained intact, and under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership, the family was able to return to Beijing. At this point, the author segues into his own restless seeking. He spent more than a decade in New York City before returning to Beijing to try his hand at curating art shows, designing architecture (he consulted on the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Olympics), and engaging in social activism (Black Cover Book). The author eventually ran afoul of the party leadership for his “intolerable insolence,” but the tenacity of his father and his artistic vision have always guided him. “In China,” he writes, “we were still living in a culturally impoverished era, but art had not abandoned us—its roots were deeply planted in the weathered soil.” Throughout, the author maintains a fluid, heartfelt narrative.
A beautiful and poignant memoir demonstrating perseverance and the power of art.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-553-41946-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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