An engaging and illuminative remembrance.
A writer who spent two years teaching English in Wuhan, China, offers her reflections in this debut memoir.
In 1979, Dykstra was one of the first 100 Americans recruited by the Chinese government to teach English at a variety of colleges around the country. They were considered “foreign expert teachers” and, along with their translators and high-ranking Communist Party VIPs, were accorded a wide range of privileges not available to many Chinese citizens; for example, they did not need to use ration tickets for food or other items. The author was assigned to Wuhan’s Teachers’ College, where she taught young teachers who’d been “worker-peasant-soldier students” during the Cultural Revolution and younger students who were among the first to enter college after that era. Xiao Wang, her translator, was one of the young teachers in training who’d never met a Westerner before. Unlike other teachers, Dykstra did not speak fluent Mandarin and had never studied Chinese history; Xiao Wang would be her guide and facilitator for the next two years. The revolution may have been over, but the physical and emotional scars of China’s recent violent past permeated the country’s psyche. As Dykstra puts it, “I stayed for two years and made some friends and was often baffled.” Along the way, she worked hard to understand the rigid, often unstated rules that governed every aspect of life in Wuhan. Over the course of the work, Dykstra weaves in historical summaries for context, but the heart of her narrative rests in the complicated, personal stories of the students and teachers with whom Dykstra became close. Xiao Wang is revealed as an ambitious powerhouse, and Huang Hua, one of Dykstra’s students, is shown to be a soulful young man with a bright future that’s later shattered. She makes effective use of classroom discussions and free-time conversations to illustrate a vast cultural and philosophical divide. Overall, Dykstra’s memoir will be a valuable resource for readers wishing for a better understanding of the China of four decades past. (A collection of personal photographs is included.)
An engaging and illuminative remembrance.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63988-215-1
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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