An affecting portrayal of the spirited nature of Hong Kong and the many challenges it faces.
The latest eye-opening journalistic account of the ongoing tumult in Hong Kong.
Journalist Lim, the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, examines the unrest in terms of dominion, possession, and defiance. “The issue of belonging,” she writes, “has always been a complicated one for me, as a half-English, half-Chinese person who was born in England but brought up in Hong Kong.” Now living and teaching in Melbourne, Lim writes, “my position on the sidelines liberates me to write more openly than others” about the vibrant, defiant spirit of the citizens, especially since the passage of the China-enforced National Security Law. The author’s determined, methodical chronicle captures her growing unease and complex thoughts about joining the ranks of the activists and dissidents. “Overnight,” she writes, “a mostly free society had become an authoritarian one.” With the freedom of the press (and the internet) severely restricted, police are targeting reporters. Lim returns often to the tragic life and exceptional work of Tsang Tsou-choi (1921-2007), a once-homeless Hong Kong artist. Nicknamed “the King of Kowloon,” he would use “misshapen, childlike calligraphy” to create graffiti asserting his grievance that he had been robbed of his ancestral land, and he became famous as a personification of Hong Kong citizens’ sense of dispossession after the handover by Britain in 1997. Throughout this smooth mixture of reportage and memoir, Lim ably captures the increasingly malignant actions by the Communist Party, which have become more alarming by the day. “The days and nights,” she writes, “were melding into a single livestream of tear gas, deployed with horrifying and mesmerizing beauty….By the end of 2019, the police had fired sixteen thousand rounds of tear gas, violating both their own guidelines and the Chemical Weapons Convention.” This book is a good complement to Karen Cheung’s The Impossible City.
An affecting portrayal of the spirited nature of Hong Kong and the many challenges it faces.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-19181-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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