Gordons memoir fails to convey the passion and excitement of her extraordinary life. As the only daughter of world-famous Russian pianist Leo Sirota, from a young age Gordon was launched on a brilliant cosmopolitan trajectory. Her earliest experiences of Europe's reigning cities and a flashing cultural elite promised the girl a heady future. According to her, however, the most important aspect of Gordon's youth was her extensive expatriate stint in Japan, where her family fled shortly before WW II, alarmed by mounting European anti-Semitism. Although she left for the US during the war, Gordon returned to Japan once WW II had ended, working as a civilian in General MacArthur's Tokyo office and assisting with the writing of the Japanese constitution, which laid the framework for postwar life in that nation. She was mandated to research and draw up the part of the constitution which altered the status of women in a society where, until then, none had ever enjoyed a bona fide legal status. The constitution also ensured education for all people in a country that in some respects remained fundamentally feudal. Gordon ably conveys the historic significance of her undertaking, while giving short shrift to personal insights. Her style hides the writer from us, muffling the excitements of her intercontinental, multi-lingual rovings. The book is also hampered by Gordon's disconcerting decision to tilt forward and backward in time, creating an uncomfortable distance between the then and the now of her story. When she took up residence in New York in 1947, Gordon by no means abandoned her unusual cultural expertise and training. Instead, she assumed a leading role in bringing the arts of Asia to an American audience and traveled, consorting with emperors, gurus, and koto players. Too bad her tale largely fails to take leave of the page. (36 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 4-7700-2145-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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