prove that poetry in its purest form is indeed universal.
A poetry-filled account of the friendship between author Crane and Ch’an Buddhist master Tsung Tsai and of their
fascinating journey through China’s remote outer regions. When maverick poet Crane meets his new neighbor, Buddhist monk Tsung Tsai, in upstate New York, the two strike up a friendship based on a mutual love of verse. Crane soon learns that his hermetic neighbor is the last master of the Ch’an sect as well as a revered scholar, artist, and healer. Once their friendship deepens, Tsung Tsai invites Crane on a quest to find the bones of his deceased teacher, thought to be somewhere in inner Mongolia. His double purpose is to honor his mentor with a ritual cremation and to return Buddhism to this physically and spiritually barren territory. Crane’s narrative recounts Tsung Tsai’s past, including a harrowing trek through Communist China to escape religious persecution at the hands of the Red Army during the famine of 1959, as well as the self-revelations his own association with Tsung Tsai elicits. Their trip brings the reader through the outskirts of China—where Mao, Buddha, and Mickey Mouse all dwell together in timeless desert villages—and on to Hong Kong, the "heart of chaos." Throughout, the matter-of-fact juxtaposition of Tsung Tsai’s spirituality with Crane’s worldly outlook makes this record of their journey refreshingly devoid of the political overtones and moralizing that usually accompany Western glimpses of modern China, resulting in descriptions as clear and pure as the poetry both protagonists love so much. Ultimately, however, Crane’s objective appears to be to pay homage to the venerable, ever-so-charming Tsung Tsai. For all his occasional narrative longeurs, Crane’s insights into Ch’an beliefs and his unlikely friendship with Tsung Tsai
prove that poetry in its purest form is indeed universal.Pub Date: March 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-553-10650-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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