This intimate look at women in Red China should not be missed.
A moving, even-handed account of three Chinese women who were part of the Communist vanguard in the 1930s.
The 85,000 soldiers who marched out of southern China on the Long March of 1934–35 were accompanied by 30 women. Lee (Chinese Literature/Univ. of Sydney) and Wiles (Translation/Univ. of Western Sydney) tell the story of three of these: He Zizhen (Mao’s second wife), Kan Keqing (the “Girl Commander”), and Wang Quanyuan (a peasant who left the husband she barely knew to take up the Communist cause). The march was especially difficult for pregnant women. He Zizhen (whom Mao had grown tired of and more or less abandoned) gave birth on the Long March and was made to leave her baby with an “opium-drenched hag living in inconceivable poverty” who was paid a few silver dollars and several bowls of opium to take the child—but at least He Zizhen’s labor was relatively uneventful. Zeng Yu, another woman on the march, went into labor in December and was carried on a stretcher until her porters bolted under fire, leaving her to face her fate alone. She then traveled by horseback until her water broke, at which point she resumed walking. Finally she collapsed and was carried by two other women (while a third cradled the protruding head of her baby, who, after being born later that night, was abandoned to a sure death). Lee and Wiles provide a rather grim portrait of life for women in Communist China in the years after the Long March, and they dryly note that immediately after the passage of the Marriage Law of 1950 (which guaranteed women equality in marriage, divorce, and property ownership), thousands of women filed for divorce. But Communist China was never a feminist utopia—if women were guaranteed legal equality, many men still harbored older attitudes about the role of the sexes.
This intimate look at women in Red China should not be missed.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-86448-569-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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