A stranger-than-fiction thriller that puts the bitter conflict between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan into clear, human perspective. Kaplan (coauthor, Yakuza, 1986) uses the opportunistic life and violent death of Henry Liu to trace how the PRC and so-called Nationalists have fought for the allegiance of 20 million overseas Chinese. Born in 1932, Liu fled to Taiwan—where Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT) had set up shop—after Mao's forces had overrun the mainland. Trained in the KMT's elite Political Warfare Academy, Liu wangled his way into a journalism career, mastered English, and made it to the US in 1967, settling in Washington, D.C., where he eked out a living as a translator and correspondent for publications in Hong Kong as well as Taipei. Eventually gaining American citizenship, Liu moved to northern California, where he and his wife ran a successful gift shop in San Francisco. A respected man of letters in both Chinas, Liu played both ends against the middle, accepting expense-paid trips to the PRC, serving as an FBI informant, and taking payoffs from the KMT. Dismayed by Liu's lack of devotion to their cause, high-ranking Nationalist intelligence agents recruited hit men from Taiwan's underworld, who assassinated the writer in 1984. Dogged work by local police, who unearthed a taped confession left by one of the killers, led to the solution of the murder. Kaplan does a fine job of explaining and recounting the savagery with which the KMT suppressed dissent throughout the world as well as on its island fortress. He also addresses (without dwelling on) the comparative ease with which the repressive regimes of presumptive American allies like Chile, Iran (under the Shah), the Philippines, and South Korea as well as Taiwan have been able to wage undeclared wars against their ÇmigrÇ enemies in the US. A brilliantly reported, if occasionally repetitive, account of geopolitical rivalry as a blood sport. (Eight-page photo insert— not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-689-12066-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
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
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