A transformational experience for author and reader alike.
East meets West in this occasionally playful yet profoundly moving graphic memoir.
Though she has drawn from her life in her popular children’s books (Foo, the Flying Frog of Washtub Pond, 2009, etc.), Yang has never offered the level of psychological reflection and familial revelation shown here. The subtitle, “An Ancestral Tale,” tells only half the story. The author narrates her own story, which encompasses the story of her father, who tells the story of his ancestors that his daughter then mediates through her artistry. The impetus for the project is the stalking of the thoroughly modern and Americanized author—then a recent college graduate—by a former boyfriend referred to throughout as “Rotten Egg.” To protect herself from what appears to be the real threat of physical harm, she retreats to the home of her far more traditional parents, who emigrated from China before her birth. She also makes a pilgrimage to her family’s homeland, where she attends the Academy of Traditional Chinese Painting and experiences the late 1980s political upheaval and repression firsthand. Returning to her family’s house in California, where her parents claim that she has wasted her education because of her bad boyfriend experiences, she coaxes stories from her father on his family, which are filled with tales of familial conflict and oppression that resonate with her own feelings of living in a prison imposed by circumstances. It’s a tale of Taoism and Buddhism, with the meditative state wondrously captured by the artist, and of the tension between the seeming passivity that spirituality appears to instill in some and the personal ambitions of others. The narrative seamlessly shifts between present and past, and between America and China, mixing the intimacy of a memoir with the artist’s visual allusions to such sources as King Lear and The Scream.
A transformational experience for author and reader alike.Pub Date: May 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06834-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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