A book that offers great clarity on an important subject without succumbing to oversimplification.
A British journalist with considerable experience in China illuminates the significance of artist and activist Ai Weiwei and his embodiment of cultural upheaval.
In a good way, this reads like an extended magazine article written for a general readership. Martin presents a profile of the artist based on illicit interviews with Weiwei following his release from 81 days of imprisonment on inscrutable charges, while providing context on the political and cultural developments that have informed his art. The plainspoken lucidity of the prose transcends the murk of so much arts criticism and political theorizing, as the author recognizes that many readers won’t be familiar with the artist’s career and the specifics of Communist Party repression in China. “I had been toying with the idea of writing a book about modern China that would use an account of Ai Weiwei’s life as its backbone,” writes Martin, employing the first-person narrative that initially seems intrusive but ultimately enhances the conversational tone. “His life and that of his father, Ai Qing, one of China’s most famous twentieth-century poets, are so intertwined with the great people and events of modern Chinese history that any biographical account would necessarily touch on the main historical events of the post-imperial epoch.” And so this book does, though it is less than a full-scale biography and more of a series of interviews, with the secret police frequently hovering, augmented by the author’s visits with other Chinese dissidents. Weiwei emerges as not only a great disciple of Duchamp and Dada, bridging the totalitarianism of Chairman Mao and Warhol’s Mao, but also a brave activist using his art and advocacy to inspire cultural revolution: “Weiwei’s experience had given him an almost evangelical zeal: he wanted to change China by changing its ideas about art.”
A book that offers great clarity on an important subject without succumbing to oversimplification.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-16775-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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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