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THE MOST WANTED MAN IN CHINA

Name: THE MOST WANTED MAN IN CHINA
Author: Fang Lizhi
ISBN: 978-1-62779-499-2

MY JOURNEY FROM SCIENTIST TO ENEMY OF THE STATE

by Fang Lizhi translated by Perry Link ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2016

A wonderfully crafted memoir, shimmering with intellectual honesty.

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A dissident astrophysicist who died in 2012 offers rare, revealing glimpses inside the opaque Chinese communist system.

Fang (b. 1936) wrote this memoir while he and his wife, Li Shuxian, were offered refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing over the course of 13 months following the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, after which he eventually settled as a professor of physics at the University of Arizona. In this eloquent memoir, Fang has utterly shed his illusions about the Communist Party, which the Beijing-born author joined at age 12. Enamored by physics, he gradually came to grasp that the communist formula was anathema for the practice of independent thinking that science required. As an idealistic youth in the Institute of Modern Physics, at Peking University, Fang organized meetings and “class-struggle campaigns.” Denounced as a “rightist” in 1958, he would be exiled from his physics work four different times between then and the 1970s and sent to the farm fields because his “thinking needed reform.” In between, he was assigned to teach at the University of Science and Technology of China in Beijing. It wasn’t long before Fang realized the absurdity of “socialism saving China,” one of numerous ironic slogans during the brutal years of famine, Cultural Revolution, and Mao Zedong’s “self-proclamation as emperor” when Fang was often separated from his wife and children. His lectures in the field of cosmology stimulated “counterrevolutionary” criticism, and his sense of urgency for reform and getting modern science accepted in China (“opening in all directions”) was denounced as “bourgeois liberal thinking.” His support of his students and writing of a letter urging amnesty for political prisoners in 1989 helped ignite the Tiananmen Square uprisings that spring, leading to his taking refuge in the U.S. Embassy. Throughout the book, Fang is candid about the development of his thinking, and his prose is clean, readable, and often forceful.

A wonderfully crafted memoir, shimmering with intellectual honesty.

Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-62779-499-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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BLACK BOY

A RECORD OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

by Richard Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 1945

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This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.

It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.

Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.