An intriguing tribute to a family and a community likely well outside most readers’ experiences.
A debut memoir of a childhood in Shanghai before the Communist revolution.
In this detailed reminiscence, the author recounts her experiences growing up as a child of privilege in Shanghai’s International Settlement in the 1930s and ’40s. The author’s affection for her birthplace is evident in her lush descriptions of the Bund, the Whangpoo River and other local landmarks, as well as in her depictions of the many Britons, Greeks, Russians and Chinese who passed through her family’s life. The book opens with a brief, informative history of European settlement in Shanghai before World War II, which provides crucial background for average, unversed readers. The author’s family history is a similar web of nationalities: Her father’s Greek parents were expelled from Asia Minor during World War I, and her mother’s Russian family fled to China as the Bolsheviks came to power. The author’s parents rose above the previous generation’s hardships, raising their own children in comfort while sharing their home with several relatives. The author acknowledges her own rarefied upbringing (“I always knew I was a privileged child, never lacking in food, clothing, or gifts”), although she never explores the meaning of that privilege as a foreigner in China. Her portrayal of China during the World War II years, and the Communist rise to power after the war, adds some moments of conflict and personal risk, but the book’s merits lie less in the story it tells than in the long-gone world it conjures. The author brings a wealth of details to life: amahs looking after children who aren’t allowed to explore the city alone, ethnic enclaves within the European community and even the joy of discovering cheese after the end of wartime rationing. Although there are occasional minor errors—including identifying Madame Chiang Kai-Shek’s college as Wesleyan rather than Wellesley and unnecessary capitalization and italics—the book remains engaging throughout.
An intriguing tribute to a family and a community likely well outside most readers’ experiences.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479153558
Page Count: 270
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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