A polished account that segues elegantly from a personal saga to a larger cultural history.
Two British journalists chronicle an affecting, bittersweet romance that began during the Russo-Japanese War.
The long relationship between Arthur Hart-Synnot, a British career officer, and Masa Suzuki, a Tokyo barber’s daughter, finally came to light after a cache of letters between the lovers was discovered in 1982. (A book delineating their romance was published in Japanese in 1998.) They met in Tokyo in 1904. Fresh from the Boer War, 32-year-old Arthur, eldest son of Irish landowners, had been sent to Japan to learn the language and attempt to forge a new alliance with this mysterious little nation that had dared to stand up to mighty Russia. Arthur met 25-year-old Masa at the Officers’ Club, where she worked as a clerk; he was immediately smitten, and she was pleased to be listened to and treated as an equal. (Japanese society expected women to be submissive and obedient.) Masa helped Arthur with his Japanese, and when he offered to hire her as a housekeeper, she managed to gain her brothers’ permission, even though it was clear that “there would be more to this role than housekeeping and language practice.” They had two sons and maintained loyal relations over many years, writing copious letters during Arthur’s postings to Manchuria, Hong Kong and Burma. Though he asked Masa to marry him and come to England, she would not. Sent into the thick of fighting in France at the outbreak of WWI, Arthur lost both legs. He gave up the idea of returning to Japan and married an English nurse who had cared for him. Masa felt furious and betrayed, but Arthur continued to write and send money until WWII made it impossible. Their surviving son, Kiyoshi, had a poignant reunion with his elderly father in 1939. Arthur died in 1942, Kiyoshi in a Soviet prison camp in 1945; Masa lived until 1965.
A polished account that segues elegantly from a personal saga to a larger cultural history.Pub Date: June 19, 2006
ISBN: 1-59420-089-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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
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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