A welcome study that sheds new light on recent Chinese history.
A well-done life of the legendary but now little-studied Chinese leader.
Fenby (France on the Brink, 1999), a former editor at the South China Post, writes of Chiang Kai-shek with admiration and revulsion at turns—reactions that were common in Chiang’s day, at home and abroad. An indifferent cadet who, in the words of one military instructor, “did not reveal innate ability,” Chiang slowly gathered power on the fringes of Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang movement, which overthrew the last ruler of the Ming dynasty; by outmaneuvering his rivals, he was able to consolidate his hold even while the movement veered from left to right, at points allying with China’s Communist Party, at others suppressing any signs of opposition. Fenby opens his account with the so-called Xi’an Incident, when, in 1936, junior officers arrested Chiang and demanded that he make common cause with the Communists against Japan; a united front, Fenby reasons, “would water down Chiang’s authority” while ending a bloody civil war. Alas, it was not to be, and though FDR once held out the hope that a China led by Chiang would be “a pillar of the new world order,” Chiang lost whatever store of good will he had among the people and was eventually driven offshore to rule as “generalissimo” of Taiwan for a quarter-century. Fenby brings some intriguing news to his account: Chiang’s offer, for one, to invade the Chinese mainland in the wake of Mao Zedong’s disastrous, brutal Great Leap Forward campaign; the machinations of American advisor Joseph Stilwell and other China hands to keep Chiang from gaining control over the anti-Japanese coalition, and Chiang’s crafty resistance. Had the Xi’an Incident not taken place, Chiang might well have crushed the Communists; but, Fenby concludes, “rather than the inescapability of Communist victory, it was the weakness of the Nationalists, Chiang’s failure as a military leader, and economic disintegration that sent the one-time man of destiny fleeing to Taiwan.”
A welcome study that sheds new light on recent Chinese history.Pub Date: March 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1318-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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