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 book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
