by Charles N. Li ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2008
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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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