An illuminating chronicle of several generations of resilient and beleaguered Chinese artists, with minibiographies, a...
A well-grounded survey of the incredible courage of Chinese artists since the first flowering of the late 1970s and subsequent crackdowns.
O’Dea, an Australian journalist who has traveled to and lived in China during the past three decades and founded ArtInfo China, first befriended Chinese artists in the late 1980s and followed their tumultuous trajectory during the years since. Here, she chronicles the lives of nine people, moving from China’s “great experiment in ‘opening up and reform’ ” in 1986, when the rehabilitated leader Deng Xiaoping, courted by the U.S. since meeting Jimmy Carter in 1979, first embarked on liberalizing reforms and artists embraced the whiff of freedom, through the tragedy of the crackdown after the Tiananmen Square revolution of 1989 and to the present embrace of forgetting and economic pragmatism. Before there was 1989, O’Dea reminds us, there was 1976, when an earlier drive for democratic action erupted in Tiananmen Square after the death of Mao Zedong, the earthquake of Tangshan, and the public mourning of the death of Premier Zhou Enlai. Many of the artists who exploded in personal expression in 1976 had been teenage Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution who were inculcated in stamping out “bourgeois liberalism” and terrorizing their teachers. Artists like Huang Rui and Mang Ke, as well as the artists calling themselves the “Stars,” created a newsletter that was eventually shut down by Deng’s regime. The author also looks at the effects of the Sino-Vietnamese War—not often discussed in China—and the “very heaven” conditions that fostered artistic freedom in the 1980s, as people began to pull themselves out of poverty. Like the death of Zhou in 1976, the death of reformer Hu Yaobang in April 1989 sparked widespread demonstrations, and the political consequences were dire, creating essentially another generation of forgetting.
An illuminating chronicle of several generations of resilient and beleaguered Chinese artists, with minibiographies, a helpful timeline, and extensive notes.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-527-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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