An interesting and detailed account.
A well-balanced biography of one of the most powerful women in Chinese history, Madame Chiang Kai-shek (née Soong May-ling), wife of Nationalist leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
Li, a writer for the Financial Times and the Economist, begins by sketching out the young May-ling’s life. Born into a rich family in Shanghai, May-ling came to America at an early age, studying at Wesleyan College in Georgia before ultimately graduating from Wellesley in 1917. In subsequent chapters, Li carefully examines how the young May-ling’s grounding in American culture and her fluency in English would prove vital for American-Chinese relations. May-ling endured a painful return to China shortly after graduating, principally because she struggled to adjust to the wildly different lifestyle, but by 1926, she had met military officer Chiang Kai-shek. Kai-shek rose to become Generalissimo shortly after, and the couple soon wed, although he had to divorce his first wife, rid himself of a few concubines and pledge his future to Christianity before May-ling’s family would give their blessing. From this moment, Li’s prose becomes increasingly absorbing as she details May-ling’s rise as advisor to and English interpreter for her husband as he trotted the globe to meet with various dignitaries. While Li shows great admiration for May-ling’s staunch opposition to Communism and her enviable oratory skills, which often saw her digging deep into the English language to use words even native English speakers found puzzling, she is also highly critical of her unwillingness to truly break free of her conservative shackles. This criticism is most pointed when Li examines the decadent lifestyle May-ling indulged in, which sharply countered that of her fellow countrymen—a factor that appears to have been frequently overlooked by those infatuated with the glamorous, charming woman. Madame Chiang Kai-shek died in 2003, at the age of 106.
An interesting and detailed account.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-87113-933-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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