CHINA’S FIRST EMPEROR AND HIS TERRACOTTA WARRIORS

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CHINA’S FIRST EMPEROR AND HIS TERRACOTTA WARRIORS

Name: CHINA’S FIRST EMPEROR AND HIS TERRACOTTA WARRIORS
Author: Frances Wood
ISBN: 978-0-312-38112-7

by Frances Wood ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2008

Intelligent, albeit conjectural; rangy yet concise—thoughtful work from an experienced Sinologist.

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Tightly structured, nimble pocket portrait of China’s First Emperor.

Qin Shihuangdi (259–210 BCE), who took power in 246 BCE, has had many mantles draped across his shoulders: founder of imperial China, enemy of the intellect, seeker of immortality, father of the world’s most elephantine bureaucracy, tyrant of the first order. But primary-source material about him is not thick on the ground, points out Wood, head of the Chinese Department at the British Library—certainly not as thick on the ground as the 8,000-man terracotta army the Emperor had buried with him. (That’s the subject of John Man’s The Terra Cotta Army, 2008, which makes a nice complement to this more straightforward biography.) Wood judiciously relies on the archaeological record, on a trove of bamboo-slip documents found at the Place of the Sleeping Tiger and on The Grand Scribe’s Records, the work of a court astrologer writing a century later under a different dynasty. The Emperor’s accomplishments suggest a strong, autocratic character, someone who could bring the anarchic Warring States to heel. He was a book-burner, wanting to focus his subjects’ attention on the present rather than some mythical, golden past. (Squelching Confucianism and Daoism was probably an additional motive.) He initiated the Great Wall, described here in captivating archaeological detail. He brought bureaucratic order and standardization to a great state in which agriculture and military prowess were of primary importance. Wood also provides colorful social-history tidbits: Peasants were forbidden to dye their clothes; a third-century BCE feast would have included “plump orioles, pigeons and geese, flavoured with broth of jackal’s meat.” He also paints in broad strokes such topics as the debate between Confucianism and legalism, the boasts Mao made about having outdone Qin Shihuangdi (“He buried 460 scholars alive; we have buried 460,000”) and the role of the afterlife in Chinese history, always with an eye as to how they illuminate the First Emperor.

Intelligent, albeit conjectural; rangy yet concise—thoughtful work from an experienced Sinologist.

Pub Date: June 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-312-38112-7

Page Count: 224

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008

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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

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GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)