by Diane Wei Liang ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2009
Simple prose creates powerful imagery as the author examines how political oppression has shaped China and the lives of its...
Novelist Liang (Paper Butterfly, 2009, etc.) recounts the events of the 1989 massacre at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
First published in 1993, Liang’s debut memoir is scheduled for publication in the United States in time for the 20th anniversary of the event. Starting with her early childhood spent in labor camps, Liang paints a vivid picture of life during the Cultural Revolution. Her intellectual parents were forced to work on a construction site while everywhere people suffered public beatings, prison terms and executions at the slightest questioning of party loyalty. Universities were closed and progressive thought was banned. After the labor camps were shut down, the author’s parents were forced to live apart for more than a decade because of differing permits of residence. Growing up without her father, Liang endured constant beatings and harassment from her fellow students. Despite membership in the Communist party, her parents were intellectuals and not peasants, for which she and her younger sister suffered greatly. When the Cultural Revolution ended, universities reopened and Liang was able to enter Beijing University during a relatively liberal period. She joined in student demonstrations for freedom of speech and democracy while experiencing friendships, love and heartbreak. When the government intervened with the declaration of martial law in Beijing, the city was taken under siege. Early in the morning on June 4, 1989, tanks rolled in and opened fire on the peaceful protestors, killing thousands. Devastated by the massacre and fearful for her life, Liang was able to escape to America. Returning seven years later, she came face-to-face with the ghosts of that day and of her past life.
Simple prose creates powerful imagery as the author examines how political oppression has shaped China and the lives of its people.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3686-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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