The book reflects the tone of its author: clear, honest and unassuming.
A Chinese-American businesswoman's memoir of exile, torture, immigration and, ultimately, astounding success.
With the assistance of Huffington Post blogger Fox (Fortytude: Making the Next Decades the Best Years of Your Life, 2011, etc.), Ping Fu, founder of Geomagic, a 3D digital-reality solution company, reveals the inspiring story of her life. Until age 8, Ping and her intellectual, doting parents lived comfortably in Shanghai. That existence was blown apart by the Cultural Revolution, during which her family was regarded as an enemy of the state. During the 1960s and ’70s, Ping and her younger sister were confined to a camp where she endured years of vicious torture that included being gang-raped when she was 10. Despite receiving no formal education between the ages of 8 and 18, she went on to attend college, but her thesis, on infanticide, landed her in hot water with politicians. Exiled, she arrived in the United States with less than $100 and English so limited she could only say, "hello," "help" and "thank you." Ping’s early years in America were peppered with encounters that ran the gamut from surreal (she was kidnapped at the airport upon her arrival) to quotidian (she studied relentlessly). In 1988, she earned a degree in computer science and joined the team that created NCSA Mosaic, later known as Netscape. She and her husband subsequently founded Geomagic. Ping advises women aspiring to be in a position similar to hers to "[t]hink about moving forward to make personal or social progress, rather than moving higher to gain a superior position."
The book reflects the tone of its author: clear, honest and unassuming.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59184-552-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Current
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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