A pleasing mix of Margaret Cho, Sarah Vowell and a pinch of Cory Doctorow.
A funny, iconoclastic Korean-American journalist and author turns her skewering lens on her own culture.
Hong (Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners, 2006, etc.) has a mischievous sense of humor when it comes to culture clashes, so it’s a pleasure to see her turn her wicked talents on “Hallyu.” It’s a broad term that describes the proliferation of South Korean pop content into the world’s culture-scape. Along the way, Hong gives a thoughtful, self-deprecating and sly analysis of the movement that brought us not only the unescapable rapper Psy, but also brilliant filmmakers like Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy), culinary superstar Hooni Kim and game developers Blizzard Entertainment (the Starcraft and Warcraft franchises). The book’s opening stories give nice insight into the author’s odd place between two worlds: A fully Americanized Korean-American girl often mistaken for Chinese, her parents moved her back to Korea, specifically the district of Gangnam. “Korea was not cool in 1985,” she bemoans in her opening line. Through the exploration of various cultural tropes, government enterprises, and social and economic changes, Hong shows how Korea got cool in the past decade or so, almost by accident. One of the more interesting chapters looks at “Han,” a sociological meme involving oppression against impossible odds and the eternal thirst for vengeance. Hong levies a lot of different factors into the reasons behind what politicians like to call the “Korean Wave,” among them a technology- and economy-based sophistication that birthed a new sense of irony, as well as a deliberate investment by the government in the creation and export of Hallyu. However, the author also believes that the wealth of addictive soap operas, video games and pop hits doesn’t represent lightning in a bottle, arguing that this brave new world is uniquely Korean.
A pleasing mix of Margaret Cho, Sarah Vowell and a pinch of Cory Doctorow.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04511-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
PROFILES
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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