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AMONG THE WHITE MOON FACES

Name: AMONG THE WHITE MOON FACES
Author: Shirley Goek-Lin Lim
ISBN: 1-55861-144-4

AN ASIAN-AMERICAN MEMOIR OF HOMELANDS

by Shirley Goek-Lin Lim ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1996

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An English professor (Univ. of Calif., Santa Barbara) and a poet, Lim recounts her childhood in Malaysia and her later life in America, where she struggles to find the meaning of home and community. Lim's mother abandoned her six children when Lim was eight years old. She could not stand her husband's quick temper and their poverty. Although he raged and beat the children, Lim idolized her fun-loving, musical father, until his marriage to their former maid's teenage daughter alienated her from his affection. At the same time, prejudice against Malaysians of Chinese descent (like her father) was rising. As the only girl in a family of boys, Lim learned early that gender also set her apart from others, yet she spent much of her childhood trying to be like her wild brothers. At Catholic school, the nuns sought to shackle her rambunctious, questioning spirit. Lim, although a lover of English, was frustrated by a system that seemed only to require the memorization of facts and ignored Malaysian literature and culture. University life proved equally frustrating. Anti-Chinese riots in 1969 coupled with two stifling romances led Lim to leave for Brandeis University. The New England cold unnerved her and loneliness unmoored her, but she earned her Ph.D., married an American, moved to New York City with her husband, and began teaching at a community college in the South Bronx. Active on minority feminist concerns and a frequent visitor to Malaysia, Lim has realized that the act of writing brings her the homeland she has been searching for. Unfortunately, Lim's tale is unbalanced. The Malaysian section is stunning: evocative writing bolstered by insights into colonialism, race relations, and the concept of the ``other.'' But her account of life in America, by contrast, seems hurried and leaves some puzzling gaps in her personal life. Still, this is an entrancing memoir. (10 b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996

ISBN: 1-55861-144-4

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Feminist Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)