A gripping look at China’s historical turbulence from someone who experienced it firsthand.
A personal memoir that details the hardship of political tumult in China during the first half of the 20th century.
In 1937, when Cheng (The $240 Million Professor, 2016) was only 3 years old, he and his family were forced to flee their hometown of Nanjing, due to the imminent arrival of Japanese invaders. The Chengs narrowly escaped the fate of those who chose to remain and suffered cruelty at the hands of the Japanese military. They took a boat down the Yangtze River to Chunking to start a new life, but they soon faced a series of heartbreaking trials. Cheng’s sister died from pneumonia, and then his grandmother died as well. When the family moved to a desperately poor farming village in Quay-chow, Cheng’s younger brother died from an illness due to drinking the fetid water. The author himself was nearly killed when a chillingly malicious neighbor lured him into the woods and abandoned him there. Then a colonel in the military orchestrated the theft of the family’s valuable jewels. Eventually, Japanese forces moved dangerously close, so the family fled yet again, this time back to Chunking. Cheng’s father was a soldier who was often deployed with his platoon, so the boy taught himself how to fish to supplement his meager diet. When the war ended, he finally returned to Nanjing with his family, which was now in ruins, but when civil war erupted, they ultimately had to decamp for Shanghai to escape Chinese Communists. This is the first volume in a series of four that will track the author’s life from his infancy in exile to his successful career as a professor and businessman in the United States. But it’s not merely an autobiographical recollection; it’s also an incisive history of 20th-century China as the country was caught in the throes of geopolitical upheaval. Cheng delicately weaves his own story with that of his homeland’s, rendering the plight of a nation in profoundly human terms. He also sensitively and candidly recounts the complexity of his sometimes-tortured relationship with his father: “I loved Baba very much, but I was afraid of him, not just because of how he would punish me for my wrongdoings but because of his quick temper and those piercing eyes that could see right through my own eyes into the very thoughts in my head.” This is an engrossing tale that will whet readers’ appetites for a sequel.
A gripping look at China’s historical turbulence from someone who experienced it firsthand.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5245-3546-9
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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