A unique perspective on a period of critical transformations in China. (b&w photos)
The extraordinary life of a courageous, outspoken American woman who survived 40 years of upheaval in 20th-century China.
In 1928, the Tennessee-born Grace Divine (1901–79) moved to New York to study for a career in opera. There she met and married Liu Fu-Chi, a wedding that made headlines in her hometown, where mixed-race unions were illegal. Fu-chi returned to his native China in 1932; Grace, now pregnant, planned to follow after their baby was born. It was nearly two years before she set off with her toddler daughter to join her husband in Tianjin, where she lived for the next 40 years, bearing two more children. Grace's son and her cousin tell her remarkable story by quoting at length from letters, articles, and a memoir she wrote. The narrative encompasses the Japanese invasion of China, WWII, horrendous postwar inflation, the communist revolution, her husband's death, Chairman Mao's short-lived Hundred Flowers movement, a radical mastectomy, and the Cultural Revolution, during which she was denounced as a “counter-revolutionary American spy,” jailed, and interrogated. Grace was eventually allowed to return to her job training teachers of college English; after she died in 1979, her Chinese colleagues held a moving memorial service. A partial memoir and, most especially her letters, offer vivid accounts of a roller-coaster life and the transformation of a well-off bourgeoisie with a cook and amahs into a loyal communist living in one room with a coal stove. Grace recounts the corruption and cruelty of the Kuomintang regime and the early successes of the new communist government. She also includes her lengthy self-criticism in front of her colleagues at the university (required during Mao's Great Leap Forward). Through it all, however, Grace never regretted her decision to remain in China—originally for her husband, then for her children, and finally for the happiness that life there brought to her.
A unique perspective on a period of critical transformations in China. (b&w photos)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56947-314-5
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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