Wrenching memoir of growing up in China during a time of war and upheaval.
According to Buddhism, human desires make life bitter like brine, and human suffering resembles an open sea of grief, writes Li (Linguistics/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara). His own life certainly gave him grounds to agree.
In 1945, when the author was five, his cold and distant father, a senior official in the Japanese puppet government, was imprisoned by Chiang Kai-shek for treason. The family was stripped of its possessions, but Li remembers his new life in Nanjing’s slums as a time of great freedom and warm friendships, as well as hunger, filth and cold. In 1946, his mother sent him to Shanghai to live with a maiden aunt, and for a brief time Li was both well fed and schooled. But law and order broke down as the civil war intensified, and two years after the Communists arrived in 1948, Li and his aunt fled to Hong Kong. He was reunited there with his mother and father, who had been released from prison. During Li’s teenage years in Hong Kong, his father was perennially disappointed and angry with him, while he felt near-constant anxiety and fear. In return for food and shelter, Li was expected to excel academically at the private school he attended. After he graduated, his father persuaded him to return to mainland China, where he was “re-educated” by the Communists in a harsh, strictly regimented reform school. Eventually, he discovered that his politically ambitious father had sent him there as a way of testing his own possible future in Communist China. He lost all trust in his manipulative father, yet his measured tone indicates that he has come to terms with his tumultuous upbringing.
Wrenching memoir of growing up in China during a time of war and upheaval.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-134664-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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