A detailed study of the rise to power of China’s dominant leader. In 1989, just before the debacle of the Tiananmen Massacre was to occur, Deng Xiaoping picked from seemingly nowhere an owl-faced, bespectacled man to lead China’s ruling Communist Party. This man, Jiang Zemin, went on to head not only the party, but China’s state and military apparatus as well. Gilley, Hong Kong correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, argues in this fascinating biography that Jiang’s rise was no accident, that he was, rather, the right man (and Chinese politics remains a man’s club) at the historically right time to lead China. Born in Yangzhou, a city near Shanghai, in 1926, Jiang at 72 is a relatively young man in the aged world of Chinese leadership. He rose steadily if unspectacularly in the party bureaucracy, mostly in Shanghai, and in the byzantine setting of factional strife that was the China of Mao Zedong, he learned the art of political caution, accommodation, and leading by consensus-building. He did not create, as did other leaders, “a private kingdom” within the party that was at once a power base and also vulnerable to attack. While Jiang had few ardent supporters, he also had few enemies. Once Deng picked him for greatness, he was generally acceptable to all power bases within the party. He has been able to expand his power by slowly winning influence over, rather than attacking and destroying, as in the past, those who oppose him. Jiang is no “emperor” in the mold of Mao or Deng, nor, Gilley explains, is such an autocratic style of leadership possible any longer in China; while China is certainly not a democracy, certain checks on the authority of even the top leaders do exist. Within this setting, Jiang has attempted, with success, to combine social stability with rapid economic growth. A well-crafted if overly long work that adds much to our understanding of the politics of modern China.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-520-21395-5
Page Count: 410
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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 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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