Affable but often self-aggrandizing.
An amusing, helter-skelter memoir by a Welsh publishing entrepreneur who found a quiet niche in China.
After traveling there in 1998, Kitto created the popular, short-lived that’s Shanghai series of magazines, modeled on London’s Timeout and inspired by H.E. Morriss’s North-China Daily News, which was closed by the Communists in 1951. His success rankled the Chinese bureaucracy, and after seven years in business he was shut down, marked a “Muslim separatist sympathizer” and forced into a long lawsuit over trademarks and a new career as a writer and cook. The first half of this disjointed work barely mentions the publishing business, instead dwelling on his discovery of a mountaintop retreat in Moganshan, a Victorian-era resort several hours outside of Shanghai where Europeans flocked in the summer and Communist leaders used as a haven for secret liaisons. Eventually Kitto, married to a Cantonese woman, leased and fixed up a secluded, terraced house in the town, cajoling and greasing the palms of contractors, workers and bureaucrats whose MO was routinely the response, Mei banfa (“there is no way” or “You’ll just have to live with it”). Between putting out fires (literally), throwing an obsequious banquet and digging up hairy bamboo (maozhu), the town’s specialty, Kitto offers an ample history of Moganshan from colonial heyday to Communist debilitation. He records the startling changes that took place in Shanghai and witnessed the tourist surge in his wake; he and his wife even opened a coffee shop in town. Kitto obviously enjoys playing the comfortable expat Englishman, congratulating himself on his bargain smarts and hardly contrite about leaving his home country (“Shanghai is a notorious refuge for runaways,” he notes).
Affable but often self-aggrandizing.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60239-657-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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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