A fine tribute to the strength of the human spirit and a reminder of the forces that threaten it.
The story of Lu Decheng, a Chinese dissident who threw paint-filled eggs at a huge portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Canadian author Chong (The Girl in the Picture: The Remarkable Story of Vietnam’s Most Famous Casualty, 2001, etc.) weaves Lu’s story into a much larger narrative of life in China during the past half century. The author opens with the crucial scene in the Square. Odd-numbered chapters continue this narrative, taking Lu through his interrogation by the police, his formal arrest and trial and his imprisonment, during which he dealt with the strictures of prison life by reading, studying and resisting attempts to “reform” him. Even-numbered chapters recount Lu’s forebears, his childhood in Clear Water Alley in the river town of Liuyang, his mother’s death, his life with his new stepmother and his troubled relationship with his father, who worried that his son was becoming a liumang, a “street rascal” or “hooligan.” The rebellious Lu spent two months in a detention center for an adolescent prank before becoming an apprentice bus mechanic. His love affair with the teenage Qiuping, who became pregnant, reveals much about Chinese restrictions on marriage and child bearing and the methods used to force compliance with the one-child law. Lu shared his dissatisfaction with life under a repressive dictatorship and his growing awareness of corruption and nepotism in the Communist Party with other young members of the pro-democracy movement, forming a bond with Yu Zhijian and Yu Dongyue, later his companions on the expedition to Tiananmen Square. The two narratives converge in the penultimate chapter, as Lu is released from prison in 1998 and returned to Liuyang. Matching the opening sequence, the final chapter is a vivid, blow-by-blow account of the acts leading up to the spirited dictatorship-defying defacement of Mao’s portrait. An author’s note summarizes subsequent events in the life of Lu, who now lives in political asylum in Canada.
A fine tribute to the strength of the human spirit and a reminder of the forces that threaten it.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58243-547-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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