Desperate to modernize in the final days of empire, China launches a bold educational experiment.
By the second half of the 19th century, the Qing dynasty ruled half-a-billion Chinese, with 40,000 civilian and military officials administering the government. The imperial system’s calcified bureaucracy, resistant to change, wedded to Confucianism and wary of foreign intercourse, struggled with a tottering economy, domestic rebellions and repeated humiliations at the hands of Western powers. One powerful statesman, Li Hongzhang, sought to reform the educational system by sending students to America to learn the new ways of thinking and returning them to China as a core group of future leaders. Under the direction of the Yale-educated Yung Wing, over a period of nearly a decade, 120 boys attended high schools and colleges, mostly in New England, as a part of the Chinese Educational Mission. Under assault from court critics who feared Western corruption of the young men, Li recalled the mission in 1880. Although a remarkably large number of the boys eventually rose to power and influence in China, Leibovitz and Miller (Lili Marlene: The Soldiers’ Song of World War II, 2008) wisely focus on only a dozen or so, tracking their journey to Hartford, Conn., the Mission’s base of operations, their acculturation to Gilded Age American society and their troubled reentry to a China tumultuously passing from corrupt empire to shaky republic. The authors’ effective, quick-stroke treatment of momentous historical events, their sensitive portraits of schoolboys who became technological, military, industrial and commercial reformers and their deft juxtaposition of two cultures, one on the rise, the other coming apart, make for a rich, multilayered tale. Today, China and America warily circle each other, and China is once again furiously attempting to modernize, busy recapitulating many of the same struggles and absorbing many of the same lessons that the Mission boys learned so many years ago.
A curious, little-known episode of Sino-American history vividly told.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-07004-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HISTORY
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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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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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