A candid balance of perseverance and despair.
A woman’s restless, often anguished journey from rural China to an American economic-consulting firm.
Shen was born to illiterate farmers in a commune-controlled hamlet along the Yangtze River. Starved for love from her parents, who were exhausted from long hours planting rice shoots in the fields, Shen found an outlet from the misery in her schoolwork. At age 17, she became the first in her family to attend college, which she soon discovered was nothing like the self-empowering Wellesley College campus she would eventually know. Instead, it was a set of cement buildings in which students simply went through the motions, having been guaranteed a teaching job for life by the government. Smart and ambitious, Shen performed well, but upon graduation lacked the money to bribe the Education Bureau for placement anywhere better than a suffocatingly small village not far from her own hamlet. As an impoverished English teacher, she fought the loneliness by sleeping with men for companionship while cursing herself for becoming a whore like her mother, who was carrying on a decade-long affair. Shen became pregnant by a married businessman, who smuggled her into the hospital for an abortion (without anesthesia)—the painful description of the event is haunting. The author finally scraped together enough money to visit booming Shanghai in 1995, which inspired her to join other desperate Chinese in “jumping in the ocean”—“giving up governmental jobs and joining the free market” in South China. Defying her parents, she worked as a secretary and Amway salesgirl before returning indebted and covered in lice. A translating job at a knitting company led to opportunities that finally made her rich—but not without moral sacrifice, a requisite (especially for women) in the corrupt business world of New China. Wealthy but still emotionally lost, Shen finally sought and found reconciliation with her family, as well as marriage to an American she met online.
A candid balance of perseverance and despair.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56947-586-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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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