An unusual and worthwhile account. (8 b&w photos, not seen)
A redolent memoir of growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), and of its pervasive social and personal aftereffects.
Mao Zedong’s brutal dictatorship unleashed social disorder on a mass scale and wrote one of the most disturbing chapters in the voluminous history of 20th-century tyranny. Nanchu (a nom de guerre), an academic expatriate living in the US, describes herself as witness, victim, participant, and survivor of that tragic time. She declares that her intention in writing is to lessen memory’s burden and commemorate the youths who died for their beliefs. The basics of Nanchu’s (and many others’) saga are widely known: Party intellectuals were tortured and detained during the virulent Red Guard uprising (a state-engineered anarchy); their children were hounded by truant gangs; these children, in turn, were caught up in the disorder and themselves gravitated to the Red Guards. Eventually the uprising gave way to the forced agrarian communal labor movement and new opportunities opened for the worker-peasant-soldier students. But if the basics are familiar, Nanchu provides a fresh perspective to the harrowing chronicles of these children of the Revolution. Her tone and her imagery are saturated in poetic Chinese idioms (“My dear friends! You fell like tender melons off the green vine!”) that rely heavily on personification and apostrophe—the same rhetoric, ironically, that the Maoists used to propagandize. Even a sympathetic reader may find a few metaphors strained (e.g., “the glory of spring competed ferociously with the brilliant sunlight”), and some may find more direct insight into the Cultural Revolution in the pages of transcribed oral histories—but it would be hard, all the same, to read Nanchu’s account without being moved.
An unusual and worthwhile account. (8 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-569-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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