by Gail Pellett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2015
An often engaging story of a Chinese journey that’s worth telling.
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A Canadian-born radical leftist and freelance broadcast journalist offers a debut memoir of her year in Communist China, where she edited English-language propaganda for Radio Beijing.
Pellett did well to delay publishing the story of her 1980 sojourn in post-Cultural Revolution Beijing. Had she published it sooner after returning to the United States, where she’s since spent most of her life working in media, she might have jeopardized the Chinese friends, colleagues, and lovers in these somewhat self-absorbed but highly engaging pages. She and her friends were under continual surveillance in a post-Mao Chinese society that was very unlike the workers’ “Little Red Book” utopia she might have imagined during her stint as a New Left revolutionary in America during the late 1960s and early ’70s. The authoritarian reality in 1980 China was one of very little personal privacy and an abundance of informants. She soon learned that talking with people while biking was the best way to avoid being overheard. As a hard-drinking, single, Western woman of 37 with red hair, lusty appetites, a stack of blues and jazz cassettes, and a propensity for asking leading questions, she attracted rabid attention. It’s no surprise that her quest for human connection, which was hampered by her inability to read or speak Mandarin, was risky for the Chinese people she met, due to Communist Party prohibitions against consorting with foreigners. Indeed, she reports that under Deng Xiaoping, campaigns against “bourgeois liberalization” and “Spiritual Pollution” later led to a million arrests and 24,000 executions. Still, she richly remembers some of the people who dared cross the line and interact with her. She also provides a marvelously deft view of street life in Beijing and other parts of China during the time of her visit. She pays less attention here to her humdrum job as a foreign expert at Radio Beijing, a state-run international broadcaster spouting the party line in four dozen languages. Readers can only marvel at her naïve realization that her colleagues weren’t really journalists and that she was “working for a propaganda institution rather than a journalistic agency.”
An often engaging story of a Chinese journey that’s worth telling.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-934395-59-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: VanDam Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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