A rare look at a disappearing world.
A warm portrait of stark, strenuous lives in remote China.
From her home in northwestern China, essayist and nature writer Li joined a family of Kazakh herders—and their camels, sheep, cattle, and horses—to spend winter on immense pastureland where the population density was “one person per every square mile and a half.” Winner of the People’s Literature Award in China, this charming memoir, the author’s first to be translated in the U.S., captures the harsh reality and quiet pleasures of the herders’ nomadic way of life, migrations threatened by the consequences of overgrazing. Amid “towering waves of immaculate golden sand dunes,” where temperatures plummet to minus 31 degrees, the family constructs a burrow made with sheep manure, the “sole building material available in the desert,” incomparable because it “can magically, continuously radiate heat.” With wall hangings, rugs, a hearth, and a tablecloth for meals, the burrow becomes a home. Although the author wondered what contribution she could make, she took on a variety of necessary tasks: “I cleaned the cattle burrow and sheep pen every day, hauled snow”—critical for providing water—“made nan, embroidered,” and sometimes helped out with the exhausting job of herding. Li offers affectionate profiles of neighbors, visitors, and members of her host family: Cuma, the father, “intelligent and ambitious, capable and cocky,” and too often drunk; his reticent wife, whose “aloofness was enough to give you goose bumps. But when she did smile, she was radiant. Light beams shot out from between her brows as if she invented this ‘smiling’ business”; and their 19-year-old daughter, who had to leave school and dreams of becoming educated and independent in order to help her family. The arduous work caused Cuma and his wife to rely on daily doses of painkillers, but their mastery of their environment, and their contentment, earned the author’s admiration.
A rare look at a disappearing world.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66260-033-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
An intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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