A lucky survivor shares a rare look into China’s deeply scarring communist system.
A grim, thoughtfully composed memoir by an artist and former Chinese academic who spent two decades on and off as a labor-camp prisoner of Mao’s oppressive regime.
In 1955, Gao was one of a large group of eager, well-indoctrinated college graduates of China’s communist system sent to the newly developing northwest region of Lanzhou to teach middle-school students. He ended up teaching art to 1,000 students, 16 classes per week, his responsibilities so heavy that, he writes, “I became a machine.” Feeling “rebuked, oppressed, and rebellious,” in 1956 the author composed a free-thinking, idealistic treatise on aesthetics, “On Beauty” (included here), which was published in an academic journal and earned the disdain of his supervisors. Branded a “rightist,” Gao was sent to the remote district of Jiuquan for “re-education through labor.” Essentially incarcerated on a prison farm, he dug ditches all day to drain the salts from the barren plain, and in the evenings attended meetings where the prisoners were forced to participate in self-analysis and inform on others. Gao provides personal anecdotes of his time at the camp, as well as studies of fellow prisoners. In “Storm,” he recalls a ferocious wind storm that covered the prisoners like “clay statues” and made time seem suddenly solid, like a stone wall. In other chapters, he reminisces about those sympathetic to his plight, as well as an unlikely friendship with a driver who relished beating prisoners with impunity. Released from the camp in 1962, Gao worked on art research in the “world-famous treasure house, Mogao Caves” in Dunhuang, but was denounced again during the Cultural Revolution. He and many fellow rightists were “rehabilitated” in 1978, but Gao was imprisoned once again in 1989 for his inflammatory writings. Thankfully he and his wife escaped in 1992 and now live in exile in Las Vegas.
A lucky survivor shares a rare look into China’s deeply scarring communist system.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-088126-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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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