A lively account, filled with the vivid details of daily and family life that make the best memoirs evocative portraits of...
Luminous recollections of a lost world, from an Anglo-Chinese writer who recounts how his privileged and sheltered childhood turned into a dangerous adolescence in war-torn China.
Born in 1934, Kwan was the youngest son of a Swiss woman who married into a Chinese family that traced its lineage back to the Han dynasty. The author’s Cambridge-educated father was administrator of China’s national railways system, and Kwan draws on his progenitor’s writings as well as his own memories in his memoir. Early childhood was idyllic: a warm-hearted nanny took care of him in a house in Beijing filled with beautiful objects, cared for by numerous servants, and the site of elegant parties. When his mother, who mostly ignored him, ran off with another man, Kwan left Beijing to live with a lively Anglo-Chinese family, the Findlay-Wus. As he adjusted to the new household, Japan invaded and occupied large parts of China, sparing only the areas where Europeans lived. After Kwan’s father married Mrs. Findlay-Wu’s sister, Kwan moved back to Beijing and started school, but the war increasingly intruded—especially after Pearl Harbor, when Kwan watched as the Japanese took away his American and British school friends with their parents. Kwan describes the family’s move to Quingdao, lonely school days during which he was reviled for being a half-caste (the Europeans and Chinese were equally racist), the civil war that broke out as Japan was defeated, the arrest of his father (now an intelligence officer), and the family’s ensuing privations. As the Communists gained control, an older stepbrother arranged for Kwan to leave China and go to school in Hong Kong. He would not return until 1987. Permitting himself the latitude usually granted to chroniclers of childhood, the author recalls numerous seemingly verbatim conversations, but these enrich an always absorbing narrative.
A lively account, filled with the vivid details of daily and family life that make the best memoirs evocative portraits of their peoples and their times.Pub Date: May 10, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-248-3
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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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