A distinguished accomplishment that radiates both intelligence and spiritual awareness. Informative and moving. (line...
Incisively told, remarkable story of a long journey from the hills of Burma to Cambridge University, from a young Burmese man now living in Britain.
Born in 1967, Pascal is a member of the Padaung, a mountain tribe with its own language and customs, its religion a mixture of animism, Buddhism, and Catholicism. Living on the edge of the jungle, the tribe members farm and hunt. Pascal’s father was a veterinarian who prospered until the so-called Socialist-Nationalist Ne Win set up a one-party state and transformed Burma, once a rich country, into one of the poorest. Pascal details that political history and offers vivid portraits of daily and family life as he records his early school years, his time in seminary, then his decision at 17 to leave and study English at the university in Mandalay. There, conditions and teaching were abysmal: 150 students often had to share a single copy of a book. To pay his fees, he waited tables at a Chinese restaurant, where his conversation about James Joyce with some English visitors led to his meeting, in 1988, their friend from Cambridge, Dr. Casey. Shortly thereafter, the government began ruthlessly eradicating all dissent. Moe, the girl Pascal loved, was jailed, then died in prison, and monks and students were brutally massacred. Previously apolitical, Pascal became deeply involved, and, when sought by the authorities, left his family. Enduring countless hardships, he headed with companions through the mountainous jungle to the rebel-held area on the Thai border. There, despairing of being able to change the situation in Burma, he wrote to Dr. Casey, who arranged for him to travel to Cambridge in 1989 and study English literature. Pascal’s English was not good, he was often lonely and homesick, but he persevered, graduating in 1994.
A distinguished accomplishment that radiates both intelligence and spiritual awareness. Informative and moving. (line illustrations, b&w photos)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-050522-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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