A meticulous and congenial, if uneven, tribute to an enterprising reporter in Asia.
This debut book tells the story of the author’s uncle, George Aylwin Hogg (1915-1945), an English journalist who spent the last seven years of his life in China.
Thomas frames his biography with his 1988 visit to Shandan, where Hogg died. The author participated in memorial events for New Zealander Rewi Alley, Hogg’s colleague in the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives; connected with the headmaster of the Bailie School that the journalist helped found; and met the Chinese brothers Hogg temporarily adopted. Hogg certainly packed plenty into 30 years. Born in Harpenden, England, he attended Montessori-style schools and studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford. Early adventures included hitchhiking around Europe and spending time on a Mississippi cooperative farm. After graduation, he joined his Aunt Muriel, who worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, in the Far East. He started in Japan in 1937, sending home letters full of keen observations about war propaganda and Korean slums. In 1938, he proceeded to China and became a journalist for the American United Press Agency. “It is quite exhilarating in a way, being packed with seething humanity,” he declared, but sobering too: he encountered dead soldiers, refugees on evacuation trains, cholera and dysentery victims, flooding, and famine. Hogg’s lively letters and journalism thus serve as a rare witness to the Sino-Japanese War. He entered guerrilla territory as a cooperative inspector and CIC publicist before becoming dean of the technical school in 1942. Tragically, he died of tetanus after a foot injury; medical help didn’t arrive soon enough. Hogg is a captivating figure, but Thomas, who played his uncle in a Chinese TV miniseries, offers little in the way of commentary. Many chapters are composed almost entirely of extracts from Hogg’s articles and correspondence. Apart from Hogg’s early years and death, and some war context and black-and-white photographs, the book doesn’t convey much that a volume of the journalist’s collected writings (to supplement his published work, 1944’s I See a New China) wouldn’t. Though frequently lacking the external interpretation most biographies provide, the work is still a fitting homage to “a wise and noble friend to the people of China.”
A meticulous and congenial, if uneven, tribute to an enterprising reporter in Asia.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-7697-1
Page Count: 502
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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