An indispensable historical document capturing the plight of “people scarred by history and then worn down by money and...
A survivor of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre offers a searingly honest examination of the lives broken by that momentous event.
Poet Liao (For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet's Journey Through a Chinese Prison, 2013, etc.) presents a series of harrowing, unforgettable tales of hardship of Chinese who essentially forfeited their youth due to their revolutionary fervor during Beijing's Tiananmen demonstrations in June 1989, when the authorities cleared the square with tanks, killing or injuring thousands of protesters. Unlike the more privileged Beijing students, whose parents had connections and could spirit their children out of the country, the “June Fourth thugs,” as the Chinese authorities named them, took the brunt of the violence for their zealous actions, such as throwing eggs at a Mao Zedong portrait. Most received harsh prison sentences involving appalling conditions and slave labor. For reciting a poem about the massacre, “rebel poet” Liao was sentenced to jail, torture, and slave labor. When he got out, he endured “a living hell” in terms of emotional turmoil, a broken marriage, sexual dysfunction, unemployment, and constant police surveillance. Ultimately, the only solace he found was in his mission to seek out and interview fellow “thugs,” whose stories mirrored his in many ways: idealistic youth who were swept up in general democratic spring fever, against the wishes of their wary parents incubated in the Cultural Revolution. As these powerful profiles clearly demonstrate, they paid dearly for their activism, suffering the brutality of the Chinese prison system and “education through labor” (including exhausting days making latex gloves for the American market) followed by joblessness, homelessness, and shunning from family and friends. The details about Liao’s interviewees—e.g., “the performance artist,” “the idealist,” “the arsonists,” “the street fighter”—are excruciating and intimate. Had he not fled the country in 2011, they may never have emerged; after all, three decades later, “the regime that committed the massacre is still in power.”
An indispensable historical document capturing the plight of “people scarred by history and then worn down by money and power.”Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982126-64-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Signal Press/Atria
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2019
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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