Intermittently engaging but ultimately disappointing and incomplete.
South Korean president Lee’s rags-to-riches account of his life within the byzantine world of that nation’s business and politics.
At the end of the Korean War, both South Korea and 12-year-old Lee were mired in desperate poverty. “Poverty,” writes Lee, “clung to my family like a leech.” Yet a few decades later South Korea became a world economic power and Lee, at age 35, the president and CEO of South Korea’s most powerful family-owned conglomerate (or chaebol), Hyundai. Lee’s story of his rise is one of absolute commitment to sacrifice and hard work—not uncommon attributes of his generation. He takes readers inside Hyundai, recounting tales of business ventures around the world. He tells of his often-strained relations with Hyundai founder and patriarch, Chung Ju-yung, of internecine battles with other chaebol such as Samsung and of precarious dealings with the military dictatorship that ran South Korea well into the 1980s. While the head of Hyundai, Lee was arrested and interrogated by the authorities. Throughout, the author has little to say about South Korea’s dramatic transition to democracy except that he supported it. He says nothing of the seminal role the struggles of Hyundai-connected labor unions played in that transition. As for his role in politics, which he began after leaving Hyundai in 1991, Lee displayed the same determination that led him to the top of the car manufacturer. Here too, though, there is a vagueness that may leave Western readers baffled. The political part of his story was added to the original version of this book published in 1995, and it has a hurried quality to it. Events unfold in a chronologically haphazard manner, and key elements of South Korean politics such as the role of regionalism and the deep power of political parties are mentioned but left unexplained. While Lee does offer a detailed study of his successful run as mayor of Seoul, which literally transformed the city, he remains largely silent on his rise to the presidency.
Intermittently engaging but ultimately disappointing and incomplete.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4022-6291-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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
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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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