A solid exploration of China past and present in which the author climbs “a punishing mountain of history with [his]...
In his first book, Marketplace correspondent Tong offers a unique look into the lives of his Chinese relatives since the communist takeover in 1949.
Though the narrative is sometimes confusing as the author runs through the lists of maternal and paternal grandparents and great-grandparents (though the character list at the beginning is helpful), it is particularly interesting in that, as his relatives say, it was the same for everyone; they all suffered. Tong’s decision to write about his family’s past was driven by the fact that so many in his family wanted to bury it. As the China bureau chief for Marketplace, he was well-placed to seek out the histories of his ancestors. The most intriguing story is that of his maternal grandmother, Mildred Zhao, who moved to Shanghai after the great flood of 1931 and ended up founding the Light of the Sea Primary School with her husband, Carleton Sun. After the communists took over the mainland in 1949, she left Shanghai for Hong Kong, and Carleton sent the children on a year later, staying behind to run the school. He was arrested in 1951 and convicted as a counterrevolutionary, and he received a 15-year sentence. Many of these stories are heartbreaking narratives of separation, of wives escaping with their children and husbands taking one but leaving other children behind. The book also represents Tong’s search for a history to pass on to his children. “Sometimes you have to flip back in the album to try to understand the pictures you’re seeing now,” he writes. “And flip slowly.” The author ends with an exposé of the baby-selling market and the dodgy methods often used to procure children for Americans desperate to adopt.
A solid exploration of China past and present in which the author climbs “a punishing mountain of history with [his] intergenerational team.”Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-226-33886-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
