Overall, though, Lilley doesn’t provide much news, leaving this primarily for US-Asia completists.
A diplomat’s memoirs recount a lifetime’s experiences in China and adjacent lands.
Born in 1928 in Tsingtao, the son of a Standard Oil executive, Lilley had to be repatriated so that he and his China-born siblings could be “Americanized.” By his account, they lived in something of a bubble in China, safe in European compounds, tended to by amahs and houseboys; Lilley clearly feels some nostalgia for that comfortable time, and indeed for the prewar era in general. (Against all current convention, though unapologetically, he insists on rendering Beijing as “Peking,” which lends his words a musty feel.) On returning to the US for college, Lilley was recruited into intelligence work and served in Asia for many years in the CIA, involved in operations in places such as Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War era. Relocated to CIA headquarters, he recalls, he soon found himself missing the field (“I couldn’t help feeling as if the CIA bureaucrats in Langley didn’t know what was going on in the field. And now I was one of those bureaucrats”), but he was rescued when Henry Kissinger started wheels turning “toward projecting a fresh U.S. relationship with China,” in Lilley’s bureaucratic phrase. Though closely identified with the CIA—and known to government officials on all sides as such—Lilley managed to make the jump to the State Department, and eventually to serve as ambassador to South Korea from 1986 to 1989 and ambassador to China from 1989 to 1991. Though on the ground for the Tiananmen Square massacre, Lilley sheds more light on doings back in Washington, which included thwarting Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s ambitions to align the US with Communist China at the expense of Taiwan, even to the extent of “considering the sale of sophisticated arms” to the Communist government.
Overall, though, Lilley doesn’t provide much news, leaving this primarily for US-Asia completists.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58648-136-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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
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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