by Anhua Gao ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2003
An authentic survivor’s story, more disturbing and awe-inspiring than any TV reality show.
A refugee now living in England graphically chronicles the hardships, losses, and horrors she endured in Mao’s China.
Born in 1949, the year the Communists took over, Gao was the third daughter of two prominent Party members. The first years of her childhood in Nanjing were happy, but in 1956 her father died of cancer, and five years later her mother succumbed to heart trouble. Her family, which now included a brother, was split up among relatives, and Gao was sent to live with an uncle in Shanghai who frequently berated her and failed to give her adequate clothing. Her life was to be even more drastically affected by the series of purges and upheavals initiated in 1964 that culminated in the Cultural Revolution. To redress the tremendous losses caused by the Great Leap Forward of 1958 and the subsequent famine, Mao ordered educated young people to settle in the countryside. Fifteen-year-old Gao and her middle-school classmates were sent to help the peasants bring in the harvest at a primitive commune with no toilets and only hay to sleep on. When students were again ordered to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, Gao’s memories of these ghastly conditions prompted her to join the army medical corps instead. There, needing a skeleton for instruction, her superiors exhumed a body, rendered the flesh, and tossed the remains to wild dogs. Like millions of other Chinese, Gao was betrayed by a family member during the Cultural Revolution; her embittered elder sister passed on to the authorities letters that included complaints about her situation. Gao was dismissed from the army, but her knowledge of English helped her find other work. An abusive husband and a volatile political climate continued to make life difficult, and she suffered a brief imprisonment as well, but Gao was determined to prevail over her troubles. Almost miraculously, she did.
An authentic survivor’s story, more disturbing and awe-inspiring than any TV reality show.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58567-362-5
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
Share your opinion of this book
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.