In this third translation of Liao’s work (The Corpse Walker, God Is Red), Wenguang Huang renders a lively, vernacular, fluent sense of the poet’s angry depiction of being abruptly apprended by police in 1990 while making a protest film after the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
A somewhat listless poet, at the time living in Fuling, whose family had been uprooted during the Cultural Revolution (involving the horribly traumatic death of the author’s older sister in a bus accident), Liao was radicalized by the government’s barbarous treatment of the student demonstrators in 1989, when he penned the incendiary poem “Massacre.” A harsh and arbitrary detention ensued over two months at the Song Mountain center, where he was brutally initiated into the hierarchical system of the inmates, such as the “menu” of “dishes” meted out as sadistic punishment among the prisoners—e.g., “Stewed Pig’s Nose,” in which “the enforcer squeezes the inmate’s lips between chopsticks until they swell up”; or “Barbequed Pig’s Chin,” when “the enforcer delivers a blow to the unsuspecting inmate’s chin from below, crushing his teeth together.” Educated and considered “intellectual,” however, the author seems to have skirted the worst of the treatment, likely due to the fact that he was literate and able to help others write letters and read. Yet he was also recalcitrant and refused to sign a confession, prolonging his incarceration. Fighting lice, the brutality of the “enforcers,” horrific deprivation of privacy and basic human needs, suicidal urges and the deep contemplation of death, the author survived by the sheer goodwill and kindness of others, such as the aged Buddhist monk who taught him to play the flute. Liao’s work is an amazing testament to the people who are battling the Chinese police state.
A rare eyewitness account by a Chinese dissident who managed to flee to the West to gain his freedom and tell his story.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-89263-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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