A bleak, disappointingly facile portrait.
Memoir of growing up female in the male-dominated Korean culture of the 1960s and ’70s.
Lee’s grim book borrows its title from a myth that one of her grandmothers—many greats removed—sacrificed herself to be eaten alive by a tiger in exchange for her descendents’ prosperity. The author grew up feeling equally constrained, as if she had been swallowed, oppressed by gross gender inequality and verbal abuse. Lee (English/Middle Tennessee State Univ.; From the Promised Land to Home: Trajectories of Selfhood in Asian-American Women’s Autobiography, 1998) structures the narrative chronologically, beginning with her memories of early life in Taegu, where her family struggled to make ends meet. Lee also had close brushes with violence, both in and outside of her home, and once witnessed a group of boys stoning an abandoned baby to death. Filled with secondhand tales about family members she’s never met, the chapters fail to connect with each other. An unsuccessful revolutionary, her embittered, tyrannical father was obsessed with replacing the dynasty with a republic, spewing invective toward the United States and scathing disregard toward women. In at attempt to “surpass Mother and Grandmother in self-denial,” Lee beginning starving herself from a young age. She regretted not having been born a boy and did poorly in school. In 1969 the beleaguered family moved to Seoul, and Lee cuts back and forth between rough-hewn descriptions of their domestic life, including her sister’s joyless marriage to a man chosen by their father, and her views on the country’s government, Christianity, socialist feminists and the educational system. In 1980, after graduating from college, she moved to New York, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1989.
A bleak, disappointingly facile portrait.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59020-266-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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