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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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