A wrenching, powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience.
A Korean immigrant and sociology professor reevaluates her mother's past and their fraught relationship.
When she was very young, Cho moved with her family from Korea to her father's small, conservative hometown in rural Washington with her half brother, her Korean mother, and her much older father, a merchant mariner who was at sea for half of the year. “In 1986, when I was fifteen,” writes the author, [my mother] developed what psychiatrists call ‘florid psychosis.’ Florid. Such a beautiful image to describe the terror. A field of flowers from which my second mother bloomed.” By the time she died, suddenly and mysteriously, in 2008, she was spending all her time in a "granny flat" in New Jersey in the house of Cho's brother and his wife. Every weekend, Cho, who was working on a doctoral dissertation and then a book about the Korean diaspora, traveled several hours to cook for her mother, an activity that “let me imagine her before she was my mother.” In this probing, vividly written memoir, charged with the pain of losing "the person I loved most in the world,” Cho moves fluidly around in time, touching on difficult as well as happy memories—e.g., her mother's former zest for foraging and baking dozens of blackberry pies. Using the tools she developed as a sociologist, as well as her own insights as a daughter, the author was able to shape an evocative portrait of her mother's past as “an adolescent in postwar South Korea under…the rising US military hegemony, who worked at a US naval base, selling drinks, and probably sex, to American military personnel.” Though Cho refuses to settle on a specific explanation for her mother's illness, which creates some sense of an unresolved narrative, the author’s re-creation of her family dynamic is haunting and filled with palpable emotion.
A wrenching, powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-952177-94-1
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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