An useful, interesting book for students of modern Chinese history and of missionary Christianity.
A Christian odyssey through three centuries of Chinese history.
Family stories have a way of unfolding gradually, in bits and pieces, and former longtime Philadelphia Inquirer correspondent Lin’s is no exception. The author grew up hearing occasional stories from her Shanghainese father, a preoccupied neurosurgeon, about his father, a minister, along with another relative, an uncle “with the curious name of Watchman Nee” who was China’s version of Billy Graham. Only after the post–Cultural Revolution détente were she and her family permitted to visit, and only then did the official repression of Chinese Christians begin to lift somewhat. Lin recounts the origins of the faith there with the arrival of European missionaries, their proselytizing coming at about the time that true opium, and not just that of the masses, was being imported in quantity—and often leading to a view among Chinese that there should be “no distinction between missionary and merchant.” In later years, writes the author, the communist state attempted to co-opt Christian churches with state-appointed clerics, when it wasn’t outright persecuting Christians to begin with. Lin traces the story of her family’s increasing involvement with organized Christianity over the years, finally leading to Watchman Nee, who early on in the communist era was accused of espionage and being an “economic criminal” because of his family’s bourgeois pharmaceutical business. By Lin’s account, he did what he could to work within the boundaries of the state’s evolving religious policy, sometimes, Lin reports, “coyly.” The author’s portraits of family members and other Shanghainese and their many difficulties during the worst years of the repression are affecting. As for the state of Christianity in China now, she expresses guarded optimism; though Watchman Nee’s works are still banned, she writes that one pastor told her the old repression would be “impossible” because “there are too many believers.”
An useful, interesting book for students of modern Chinese history and of missionary Christianity.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4422-5693-4
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2017
An authentic and fresh extension of the author’s successful Web series.
Writer, producer and director Rae, famous for her popular Web series, "The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl," channels her humor and attention to detail into this eponymous collection of personal essays about all the embarrassing moments that have made her who she is.
Sharp and able to laugh at herself, the author writes as if she's unabashedly telling friends a stream of cringeworthy stories about her life. Having grown up with the understanding that laughing at and talking about people was a form of entertainment and bonding, Rae continues the tradition by inviting readers into her inner circle and making her own foibles her primary focus. Almost 30, she opens up about nearly everything in her life, from her lifelong fear of being watched while eating in public to acutely awkward experiences with Internet dating and cybersex. The theme that race plays in this book is integral, although Rae's approach, as with all of her subjects, is decidedly humorous and lighthearted; she veers, always, toward a personal tone as opposed to one that's political or polemical. Her unwavering candidness, the sheer energy of her voice and the fact that she clearly finds herself to be terrific material make her a charismatic, if occasionally exasperating, narrator worth rooting for. Having been in a committed relationship for seven years, Rae unpacks how her Senegalese parents’ union contributed to her attitude (indifference) toward marriage. Some readers will find her proclamations and direct confessions offensive and be turned off; others may be offended but laugh out loud anyway. In Rae, her audience has landed on a singular voice with the verve and vivacity of uncorked champagne.
An authentic and fresh extension of the author’s successful Web series.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1476749051
Page Count: 210
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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