Low-key recollections of a distant place that once was, and still is home.
From a daughter of American missionaries, a poignant memoir of growing up in Hangchow, the beautiful Chinese city known as “heaven below”—before war and urban planning destroyed so much.
Born in 1913 in Shanghai but raised in Hangchow, Schultheis spent most of her early life in China. Although she went to college in the US (and her family returned there on leave), she became part of what sociologists now call a “third culture”: neither an immigrant nor a native, she straddled both worlds and has felt all her life an affinity with the country where she was born. And Hangchow (celebrated by poets and artists for its canals, its bridges, and its majestic West Lake) will always be home for her—an impression that was only reinforced by later visits she made during the 1980s, as China once more became accessible. Schultheis’s father worked for the YMCA, and she relates how many of their excursions (to the island in the middle of West Lake, for example, or to observe the great tidal bore on the Hangchow River) were shared with other missionary families living in the area. There were also frequent tennis parties and picnics, and (because there were no western-style hotels in existence then) Schultheis’s family played host to a long succession of American guests (among them the great John Dewey) who stayed in their home. The author’s prose is graceful and free of artifice, and her vividly detailed recollections—of her family servants, visits to the silk shops, the street vendors who came to the house selling toys as well as walnuts, the famous landmarks of the city, and seasonal events such as the Lantern Festival and the Chrysanthemum show—succeed in breathing life into what might have remained a dry exercise in nostalgia.
Low-key recollections of a distant place that once was, and still is home.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2000
ISBN: 1-882897-46-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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