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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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