The prose needs serious tightening and burnishing, but Yang has performed an important service in bringing readers the...
An uneven but inspiring memoir of the Hmong author’s flight from post-Vietnam terror in Laos and Thailand to the United States.
Expelled from China centuries ago, the Hmong people lived in the mountains of Laos, where the CIA recruited them during the Vietnam War. When the Americans left, the Hmong fled to the jungles as their vindictive former enemies hunted and slaughtered them relentlessly. A fortunate few—Yang’s family included—escaped across the Mekong River into Thailand, after which, eventually, they found their way to America. The strongest parts of Yang’s memoir deal with these early years, most occurring before her birth in 1980 in a Thai refugee camp. Delivering her was her paternal grandmother, who emerges as a figure of towering importance to the author. The survival of the family was nearly miraculous; flood, disease, poverty, hunger, violence and despair all threatened them continually. In 1987 they finally arrived in Minnesota, where they faced new struggles. During the ensuing 20 years, the parents worked ferociously, the children succeeded academically (the author graduated from Carleton College) and the American Dream, in many tangible ways, was realized. As such, it’s unfortunate that the final two-thirds of the text is unbalanced and vitiated by cliché. The grandmother’s illness, death and funeral consume nearly 40 pages, testing the resolve of even the most lachrymose reader. The freshness of the language—so evident in early chapters—grows ever more stale, and skeptics may roll their eyes at accounts of ghosts, witches and shamanic miracles.
The prose needs serious tightening and burnishing, but Yang has performed an important service in bringing readers the stories of a people whose history has been shamefully neglected.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56689-208-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
Weber (European History/UCLA; France, Fin de Siäcle, 1986; etc.) skillfully paints a somber portrait of France in decline. War and the threat of war shaped France in the 1930s. Though the nominal victor of WW I, France never recovered from losing over a million dead and over three million wounded. About the inert Depression-era French economy, Weber reflects that ``the spirit of Thomas Malthus ruled over the land.'' With a less dynamic economy and a significantly lower rate of postwar population growth than Germany, Italy, or Britain, France produced a succession of leaders, such as Edouard Daladier and LÇon Blum, who reflected the country itself: conservative, backward-looking, irresolute, and determined to avoid another war with Germany at all costs. Weber notes the familiar diplomatic, economic, and political indicators of France's decline in the 1930s—its fractured politics, its failure to oppose a resurgent Germany, the repudiation of its American debt from WW I, its fatal pacifism in the face of German aggression. But he focuses primarily on social and cultural history. A significant drop in the servant population, greater urbanization of what had been a predominantly agrarian economy, the falling value of the franc, and labor legislation all had transformative effects. Nonetheless, some things changed very slowly. The emancipation of women, Weber notes, was ``slow, patchy, and indirect,'' with women receiving the ability to take legal action without their husbands' consent only in 1938, and the vote in 1945. With France's decline as a great power, people became preoccupied with sports, films, and religion (Weber describes the religious revival of the period as the ``Indian Summer'' of French Catholicism); xenophobia and anti-Semitism became more pronounced as economic conditions worsened. In the end, the hollow years gave way to a war for which France was unprepared, and to years of occupation. An eloquent and thoughtful look at France in the interwar period.
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03671-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Duncan's second book on the Lewis and Clark expedition (Out West, 1987) is the companion volume to the newest documentary by Burns, scheduled to air on public television stations in early November. The details of one of the most remarkable official journeys in American history have been the subject of many narratives, first and most prominently Lewis and Clark's own record of the trip. Duncan provides a useful if brief overview of the expedition conceived by Thomas Jefferson, offering frequent comparisons between the largely untouched West that the expedition traversed and the same landscapes today, as well as some lively asides on later incidents along the Lewis and Clark trail. One hundred color and fifty black-and-white illustrations, including period drawings and paintings as well as modern photographs, considerably enliven the narrative. A charming if terse summary of the journey; readers wanting a detailed history should look elsewhere. (First printing of 100,000; Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-46052-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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