A thorough but not always convincing story of foreign intrigue.
From Thondup, the current Dalai Lama’s elder brother, a personal perspective on the history of Tibet since the Chinese occupation.
Both proud Tibetan nationalists, Thondup and the Dalai Lama were decidedly separated at birth. The Dalai Lama was destined to “cultivate and practice love, tenderness, compassion and tolerance,” while Thondup has been well-versed in the grittiness of international political intrigue: “I do not care whether the people I work with are good or bad, whether I like them or dislike them. I just try to carry out my work.” Thondup tells his story to China specialist Thurston, who delivers plenty of her own opinions in the introduction and the afterword. Thondup doesn’t forgo family history—there is excellent background on the famed Kumbum Monastery and the Yellow Hat sect of the Gelugpa school of Buddhism—nor his latest incarnation: “I am known here as the noodle maker of Kalimpong.” But in between, the author chronicles a life of vibrant activity, which, depending on one’s political persuasion, was heroic or ill-advised, though not self-aggrandizing. What emerges from the tales of his diplomacy and interlocution, shuttling among Tibet, China, Taiwan and India, wherever he was needed; the scheming and plotting with the CIA (“My role with the CIA weighs heavily on my conscience”); and the at-times overwhelming detail, is that Thondup is a progressive Tibetan, a foe of the entrenched elite and a friend of the workingman—though he often found himself in the wrong place, with the wrong people at the wrong time. Additionally, elements of the story are hard to believe, most glaringly that the Dalai Lama had no knowledge of CIA involvement in Tibetan resistance, as well as the claim of foreign-instigation behind the recent riots (both of which Thurston notes).
A thorough but not always convincing story of foreign intrigue.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61039-289-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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