The tale of a young Japanese woman's encounter with the West during the Meiji era—as told with unfortunately little resonance by great-granddaughter Kuno. In researching this story, Kuno not only retraced her ancestor's footsteps in the US but found a rich trove of letters and memorabilia to draw on in the Yale and Vassar archives. Sutematsu, daughter of an impoverished samurai who'd supported the shogun against the emperor, was a young participant in the 1868 siege that ended the shogunate. Four years later, the 11-year-old Sutematsu and five other girls left Japan to be educated in America. Their education was funded by the imperial government, which had embarked on a program of rapid modernization, but this support didn't reflect any official embrace of women's equality but, rather, the ``dubious premise that intelligent women would become intelligent mothers and intelligent mothers must give birth to children as equally endowed with brains.'' Sutematsu was fortunate to be placed in the New Haven home of the Rev. Leonard Bacon, a noted abolitionist and preacher, where she became a beloved member of the family and formed lifelong friendships. Kuno records the young woman's successes in high school; her even more luminous time at Vassar, where she was class valedictorian; and her poignant reentry into Japanese society. Recalled home by the government in 1882, Sutematsu soon realized that Japan wasn't ready for an emancipated woman. She married Japan's army minister, a much older but cosmopolitan and enlightened man, in order to work behind the scenes to realize her ambition of educating women—which she did by helping to establish the nation's first school of English and higher learning for Japanese women. A rather perfunctory introduction that only hints at the implications and pathos of Sutematsu's story. Sutematsu and her brave companions deserve more, but this is at least a long overdue beginning. (Twenty-six b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 4-77001-638-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
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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