Ross (Journalism/Northwestern; Escape to Shanghai, not reviewed) tells the story of Wen Zangde (1900-88), whose extraordinary life mirrored the vicissitudes of 20th-century Chinese history. Wen was born to Chinese immigrant parents in San Francisco, where, as a child, she met Dr. Sun Yatsen, who was later to become president of China upon the overthrow of Manchu rule. In 1914 Wen went to college in Beijing. She remained, married, and moved in high society and government circles with her banker husband. In the early '30s, fleeing the Japanese occupation, they moved with their children to Hong Kong; after Hong Kong itself fell to the Japanese during WW II, Wen took her children back to China, where she had to deal with armed Chinese bandits and Japanese soldiers. She fled again to Hong Kong after the Nationalists were defeated by the Communists; but her admiration for Zhou Enlai (and her husband's infidelities) led her to return to Shanghai, where she taught English at the prestigious Foreign Languages Institute School. Ross devotes the second half of his book to her ten years of humiliation, imprisonment, and beatings at the hands of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Wen was accused of using nonproletarian language in her lectures (e.g., describing a woman as ``beautiful'') and of spying for her husband's Nationalist newspaper in Hong Kong. She refused to confess to being a spy and was released in 1976. Wen, who spent her final years in Oakland, Calif., emerges as a model of heroic stoicism—but she also remains somewhat distant. Ross sticks to the epic and to the historical. Readers may want to know more of her inner life, especially her feelings about her marriage, China itself, and her sufferings. Still, a solid account of one woman's remarkable physical and moral endurance.
Pub Date: June 30, 1994
ISBN: 1-55553-192-X
Page Count: 168
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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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