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
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
