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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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