A powerful (pseudonymous) account of life in China after the Communist victory, written by a woman who accompanied her family back to China from the US. Her father, fearful of the growing civil war between the government and the forces of Mao-Tse-Tung, left China toward the end of the Second World War, but returned, full of optimism, in 1949. The author, schooled in the US, brings a vivid dual sensibility to bear on the gradual disillusionment that followed: their classification as —national bourgeoisie—; the relentless pressure on them to sell their house to the government; the imprisonment of her father without charge for seven months. And yet these, she writes, were —the good years— in which everyone “was in an easier state of mind and feeling better disposed toward the new government.— In the years which followed, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, millions were to die, and she and the 400 men and women who worked with her in the Central Music Conservatory were sent to work in the countryside. Her father died because all the qualified doctors and specialists had been sent out to raise animals and scrub floors. She found a book on Chinese technology in the 17th century, and the only difference she could find was that they then used animals instead of people as their beasts of burden. In telling the story, Chen destroys the myth that most Chinese willingly waved the Little Red Book: “Nothing could be further from the truth. This performance was a farce, and every rational Chinese despised it.— With the fall of Chiang Ching, the climate improved somewhat, and Chen received a Rockefeller grant to the US, where she has remained since the Tiananmen Square massacre. An often harrowing account of a life lived in circumstances where tragedy, terror, and the surreal were mixed, by a woman who never lost her sanity or her sensitivity. (Radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-56924-742-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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