Some of the impressions are dated, but the majority are charming and revealing.
Impressions of China from an experienced guide.
From 1995 to 1997, Meyer (In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, 2015, etc.) was stationed in a small town as a Peace Corps teacher of English. He later went on make bilingual travel journalism his livelihood, and here, he provides a humorous, detailed chronicle of the kind of bewildering, bracing contact impressions between him and the Chinese that illustrate both the huge divide between the two countries as well as the shared humanity. What he underscores throughout is how rare seeing a white person was for most Chinese at this transitional time and the curiosity of the Chinese students about Americans. Many admitted outright that they had been taught to distrust America, yet they liked him, whose name transliterated in slang as “Sold Son” or “Heroic Eastern Plumblossom.” Speaking Chinese that sounded like a Sichuan farmer’s, Meyer had many delightful and appalling adventures, and he delineates his experiences with a great verve and a light hand. He recalls the trepidation he felt when locals menacingly shouted their word for “foreigner” at him. But he also experienced a curious opening of the Chinese mind, a process that had begun some years earlier when Deng Xiaoping famously declared, “we have nothing to fear from the West.” As a teacher, Meyer was urged to “teach the Beatles,” which turned out to be “sound pedagogical advice.” The author posted many of his early writings to publications in the U.S. as well as to his family via letters. Eventually, love intervened, in the form of a fellow teacher at his new school in Beijing; Frances was a bright student thwarted in her ambitions until she met Meyer. The author depicts many moving moments, such as the wonder of one student when he brought them (for “extra credit”) to Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1999: the 10th anniversary of the famed clash.
Some of the impressions are dated, but the majority are charming and revealing.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-935-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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