A somewhat long but highly readable and historically valuable memoir of China.
In this lengthy memoir, a Hong Kong–based entrepreneur and investor recounts his life in China under the totalitarian Communist regime of Mao Zedong.
Zhang (The Golden Road, 2012, etc.) creates an alter ego, Shanghai-bred Zhuang Xiaoping, to serve as the protagonist of his ambitious retelling of the mass insanities during Mao’s reign. The book traces the almost unimaginable travails of the crafty, resilient Shanghai-bred Zhuang and his relatives, friends and acquaintances as they strive to survive a stultifying, terrifying epoch, when failure to revere Chairman Mao could be fatal. The book focuses on the period from 1949, when Mao took power, to 1977, after Deng Xiaoping succeeded him and the social turmoil of the Cultural Revolution had finally abated. The young Zhuang is burdened by a “bourgeois” background that constantly causes people to suspect him of capitalistic sentiments, but he learns early on to keep his mouth shut. Later, he becomes the target of party functionaries and fellow students during humiliating political “struggle” sessions in college. Later, he adjusts to zealous Red Guard teams ritually ransacking his home in search of counterrevolutionary evidence. Only in 1979, when Zhuang is on the brink of middle age, do he and his family finally slip into Hong Kong using forged papers. Zhang’s writing is serviceable throughout, but he particularly excels at reproducing mind-numbing Maoist jargon. However, a more detailed recounting of Zhuang’s obligatory political sessions at college might have added to the narrative. The author’s use of fictional characters may make readers wonder how closely the story adheres to his actual life experiences. That said, he still delivers a satisfying portrayal of the tenor of existence under Mao.
A somewhat long but highly readable and historically valuable memoir of China.Pub Date: June 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1477428719
Page Count: 552
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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