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THE WHITE-HAIRED GIRL

BITTERSWEET ADVENTURES OF A LITTLE RED SOLDIER

The intelligent and affecting memoir of a young woman who grew up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and managed to thrive despite its horrors. Sun-Childers, who authored this autobiography with her American husband, has only the vaguest memories of life before the Cultural Revolution. She writes that her parents, a beautiful young couple who spoiled their plump little daughter, had both been government-employed graduates of the prestigious Chinese Diplomatic Institute. But in 1966, when Jaia was two years old, life changed drastically for her and her parents. Suddenly beauty became bourgeois, intellectual pursuits suspect. During the week Jaia attended a boarding kindergarten where strict teachers taught the children to recite Chairman Mao's wisdom before they were old enough to read his words or understand them. Jaia's mother was sent, and Jaia with her, to a reeducation camp, while Jaia's father became a philandering midlevel employee of the new government regime. Jaia, meanwhile, was torn between the desire to be a good little red soldier—who denounced her own mother, with near-disastrous consequences, for accidentally dropping a pin with Chairman Mao's picture on it facedown on the ground—and feelings of resentment when she was criticized by her cruel, politically savvy peers for being too good at her studies, too clean, or too vain about her appearance. But when Jaia was still an adolescent, the Gang of Four were denounced, and intellectuals were exonerated. Jaia was allowed—encouraged—to study and achieve. She was finally sent to America to attend college, where she has remained. Many stories have been shared about casualties of the Cultural Revolution, but Sun-Childers's stands out for its unique childhood perspective and its probing treatment of the loss of innocence. (photos, not seen)

Pub Date: April 22, 1996

ISBN: 0-312-14093-2

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Picador

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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