The life of China's aristocrats before the Revolution could be the subject of a fascinating account, but this complacent and...
A rambling memoir of boyhood in a wealthy family in China before the Cultural Revolution.
Leo, who emigrated to the US and became an interior designer, recalls the mind-bogglingly privileged lifestyle his family enjoyed in the 1930s and 1940s. The early chapters offer intriguing descriptions of the luxurious family compound outside Changchow where he spent his infancy, though it seems unlikely that they are genuine memories. We barely glimpse the impoverished workers who made their masters' comforts possible; one passage casually describes servants cleaning the family's chamber pots "with detergent and handfuls of small clam shells, scrubbing them briskly with small bamboo whisks." There are hints of complicated relationships among the assorted characters peopling the households in Changchow and Shanghai, where Leo moved at the age of two. He lists various siblings, in-laws, and grandparents, but the descriptions are too generic to evoke distinct personalities or reflect generational or social differences. The author depicts the sexual shenanigans of the men, and the conflicts among their wives, mistresses, and prostitutes with gusto, but he offers no insight into the sexual politics that must have been involved and offers no social or cultural analysis whatsoever. Stripped of any larger cultural significance or context, the accounts of assorted catfights and recitals of the expensive clothes bought by the wives rapidly become tedious. Insulated by his parents' wealth, Leo barely acknowledges the Japanese occupation or the rise of Communism, and he offers more information about his grades in elementary school and his relatives' medical conditions than about the momentous historical events taking place. Even when Nationalist troops commandeer the family's residence, Leo observes only that "the troops ruined our lawn" and "the hardwood floors in the living and dining rooms were also badly charred from the women cooking on them with kerosene stoves." It's hard to work up much sympathy.
The life of China's aristocrats before the Revolution could be the subject of a fascinating account, but this complacent and oblivious narrative isn't it.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56167-596-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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