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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
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More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.
12
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The former first lady opens up about her early life, her journey to the White House, and the eight history-making years that followed.
It’s not surprising that Obama grew up a rambunctious kid with a stubborn streak and an “I’ll show you” attitude. After all, it takes a special kind of moxie to survive being the first African-American FLOTUS—and not only survive, but thrive. For eight years, we witnessed the adversity the first family had to face, and now we get to read what it was really like growing up in a working-class family on Chicago’s South Side and ending up at the world’s most famous address. As the author amply shows, her can-do attitude was daunted at times by racism, leaving her wondering if she was good enough. Nevertheless, she persisted, graduating from Chicago’s first magnet high school, Princeton, and Harvard Law School, and pursuing careers in law and the nonprofit world. With her characteristic candor and dry wit, she recounts the story of her fateful meeting with her future husband. Once they were officially a couple, her feelings for him turned into a “toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder.” But for someone with a “natural resistance to chaos,” being the wife of an ambitious politician was no small feat, and becoming a mother along the way added another layer of complexity. Throw a presidential campaign into the mix, and even the most assured woman could begin to crack under the pressure. Later, adjusting to life in the White House was a formidable challenge for the self-described “control freak”—not to mention the difficulty of sparing their daughters the ugly side of politics and preserving their privacy as much as possible. Through it all, Obama remained determined to serve with grace and help others through initiatives like the White House garden and her campaign to fight childhood obesity. And even though she deems herself “not a political person,” she shares frank thoughts about the 2016 election.
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6313-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2018
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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