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
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
SEEN & HEARD
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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