An ancillary but meaningful document of a time too little chronicled and now all but forgotten by younger Chinese people.
Scarifying account of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
What brought about the revolution, apart from Mao’s constantly stirring things up to keep friends and enemies alike off balance? Ji (1911-2009) doesn’t profess to know, but he’s irritated at those who do have the answers and won’t release them: “I think their refusal,” he writes, “runs contrary to the attitude of truth-seeking that a materialist should have.” Whole worlds are encapsulated in that sentence, for the author remained until his death a supporter of the Communist state. That makes the events of June 1966 all the more incomprehensible to an outsider. It was then that he was branded a “reactionary capitalist academic authority” and initiated in a regime that in the months to come would involve questioning, haranguing, abuse, criticism, and self-criticism. The author allows that he had been the department head of an Asian languages program for 20 years, and given that the mob of Red Guards surrounding him wasn’t likely to leave him in peace, he selected the label that fit him most closely. The Red Guards were thorough in the extreme; they accused him of being insufficiently ardent by virtue of the fact that his portrait of the Great Leader wasn’t dusty. But Ji, never quite playing along—some degree of resistance, he later lets slip, was crucial to survival—replied that it wasn’t dusty because he cherished it so much that he polished it constantly. It was off to the metaphorical cowshed all the same. A bestseller in China, this memoir calls attention to the tremendous injustices wrought in that anarchic time. Western readers may find themselves unsold by the author’s too-frequent protestations that in recounting his tribulations, he means his former accusers and abusers no harm. Still, that seems a mere formula, for his pages seethe with grievance and reckoning.
An ancillary but meaningful document of a time too little chronicled and now all but forgotten by younger Chinese people.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59017-927-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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
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