A well-written, moving perspective on imprisonment, World War II and the history of Shanghai.
A survivor of World War II internment recalls cosmopolitan, pre–World War II Shanghai and three years as a prisoner of the Japanese army.
Born in Shanghai to British expats, Blair (Shanghai Scarlet, 2012) spent her early childhood with her brother, parents and Chinese caretakers in the International Settlement, a predominantly British concession within Shanghai. Her memoir opens in 1941, when innocently content 5-year-old Blair is gently woken by Ah Ling, “my nurse, the centre of my life, my Chinese mother.” Readers know Pearl Harbor will be bombed and the world will change, but Blair takes time to paint her life before that in the concession, a “lone islet” or gudao of safety, as well as the bustling “hot din” of Shanghai. As December nears, Blair senses tension, but even after Japanese soldiers seize control of the International Settlement, she fails to comprehend the danger; she writes of Christmas cake and receiving a new doll. Throughout her memoir, Blair maintains this difficult balance of viewpoints. She details historical events (she later studied history at Glasgow University) yet relates her story as a child. In July 1942, Blair’s family is relocated to their first camp, where Blair enjoys a “last, perfect summer” of swimming, her father’s prodigious baking and the relative freedom to roam. Soon, rumors circulate of more dire internment camps, Blair’s father is imprisoned, and Ah Ling returns to Canton. Blair, her mother and brother move to a closely guarded, crowded camp and later to a squalid, dilapidated convent. Through a jury-rigged radio disguised as a toy, prisoners keep tabs on the war, while Blair skillfully builds suspense as camp conditions worsen. Yet she remains a child, knitting dolls’ clothes from unraveled sweaters, re-reading Beatrix Potter and daydreaming of summer vacation. Only as her 9-year-old body grows thin, her mother sick and her father’s fate more tenuous do readers glimpse the lasting effects of war. Young Blair swings obsessively on makeshift parallel bars, each swoop recalling her father: “Is he safe…Is he safe?”
A well-written, moving perspective on imprisonment, World War II and the history of Shanghai.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2007
ISBN: 978-1425111427
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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