Informative and entertaining perspectives on Asia.
In this scattershot collection, Buruma (Anglomania, 1999, etc.) examines a wide range of cultural, sensual, and destructive encounters between East and West and the gross, subtle, and sometimes violent ways in which Orient and Occident have misunderstood and changed each other.
Buruma’s dichotomy of “missionary and libertine” sums up contrasting Orientalist misperceptions of the Far East: at the extremes, Westerners often viewed Asian countries as zones of guilt-free eroticism and, on the other hand, as places in need of the bracing discipline of Western morality. Asians, in turn, have had their sometimes-surprising take on the West, on colonialism, and on their own traditional cultures. Critiquing the literature, popular culture, film, and politics of Asia, Buruma meditates on some of the results: the disorienting blend of Western-style narcissism with traditional Japanese themes in the life of the “suicidal dandy” novelist Yukio Mishima; the kitschy work of Japanese writer Yoshimoto Banana; the Tokyo musings of American Japanophile Edwin Seidensticker; the Western-influenced work of Bengali director Satyajit Ray and novelist V.S. Naipaul; the real-life affair between Mircea Eliade and Maitreyi Dasgupta, and its literary aftermath; the political autobiography of the Radcliffe-educated Benazir Bhutto; the peculiar combination of racism and benevolence that characterized the American conquest and rule of the Philippines; Hong Kong’s transition to Chinese rule; contrasting Japanese and US views of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the mutual underestimation of Japanese and American that helped cause the Pearl Harbor attack and persists today. Complementing the generous scope of the author’s imagination is Buruma’s humane and literate voice, which illuminates the cultural (and other) contrasts between East and West while always engaging the reader.
Informative and entertaining perspectives on Asia.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50222-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
James Baldwin has come a long way since the days of Notes of a Native Son, when, in 1955, he wrote: "I love America more than any other country in the world; and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." Such bittersweet affairs are bound to turn sour. The first curdling came with The Fire Next Time, a moving memoir, yet shot through with rage and prophetic denunciations. It made Baldwin famous, indeed a celebrity, but it did little, in retrospect, to further his artistic reputation. Increasingly, it seems, he found it impossible to reconcile his private and public roles, his creative integrity and his position as spokesman for his race. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, for example, his last novel, proved to be little more than a propagandistic potboiler. Nor, alas, are things very much better in No Name In the Street, a brief, rather touchy and self-regarding survey of the awful events of the '60's — the deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the difficulties of the Black Panther Party, the abrasive and confused relationships between liberals and militants. True, Baldwin's old verve and Biblical raciness are once more heard in his voice; true, there are poignant moments and some surprisingly intimate details. But this chronicle of his "painful route back to engagement" never really comes to grips with history or the self. The revelatory impulse is present only in bits and pieces. Mostly one is confronted with psychological and ideological disingenuousness — and vanity as well.
Pub Date: May 26, 1972
ISBN: 0307275922
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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