A multilayered memoir that successfully weaves historical detail with familial emotions of different generations and...
Family lore is shared and family secrets are revealed in this two-in-one memoir, which also offers a unique perspective of a pivotal period in 20th-century Chinese history.
After Ruth Tsao Chai’s death, her surprised family discovered that she had secretly arranged to be buried alone rather than in the plot she and her devoted husband had purchased years before. In order to understand Ruth’s strange choice, her first-born son, Winberg, and her granddaughter, May-lee (My Lucky Face, 1997) examine the woman’s eventful life. Through alternating narratives and points of view, a three-dimensional portrait emerges of a woman who defied traditional expectations. Intelligent, beautiful, stubborn, and a Christian, Ruth was one of the first women admitted to a university in China. She refused an arranged marriage and instead chose Charles, who courted her while they were both students in the US. After they married and returned to China, they became involved in the country’s changing political tides and significant events—including the Japanese invasions. It was Ruth’s intuition that kept her family alive during WWII and enabled them to immigrate to the US. But her life never really turned out as she truly wished, and she grew resentful and suspicious with age and eventually made her unusual burial request. In their investigations, son and granddaughter journeyed to China, where Winberg’s memories were rekindled and May-lee gained a sense of her own identity by learning about her family’s origins. A personal photo appears at the start of each chapter, which nicely creates the illusion of thumbing through a family album. By looking at the faces of people now departed but once vividly alive (especially Ruth’s, as she ages through the chapters), the reader is inspired to address universal moods and longings.
A multilayered memoir that successfully weaves historical detail with familial emotions of different generations and fulfills Ruth’s ultimate wish: to be remembered. (b&w photos throughout)Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26808-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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