The dramatic odyssey of an American who cast his lot with mainland China's Communists following WW II—and who lived to regret it. A member of the American Communist Party who had organized coal miners and steelworkers in the South prior to entering the Army in 1942, Rittenberg was trained as an interpreter. Posted to Asia, the author stayed on as a UN employee after V-J Day, and he soon joined forces with the Reds who eventually wrested control of China. The only US citizen ever to be accepted by the Chinese CP, Rittenberg earned his keep as an upper-echelon official in the Party's Broadcast Administration before, during, and after the Revolution. An ardent leftist, he gave his intellectual and ideological all to the presumptively common cause—and, for his pains, he was twice imprisoned, for a total of 16 years. Though rehabilitated following a ten-year stay behind bars that began at the height of the Cultural Revolution, he and his loyal Chinese wife made for the States in 1980. Here, with the help of Wall Street Journalist correspondent Bennett (The Death of the Organization Man, 1990), Rittenberg offers an account of his China sojourn that's remarkable, among other reasons, for its near- perfect pitch. At the outset, he tells his tale in the same awed tones as might a callow, hero-worshipping youth. Subsequently, as he gains maturity and perspective, his voice becomes that of an aging radical no longer willing to swallow the metamythical pronouncements of despots whose lust for power has undermined a shared vision. Throughout, moreover, Rittenberg (who turned 70 last year) provides insightful takes on Mao, Jiang Qing (Mao's hard- driving wife), Zhou En-lai, Lin Biao, Deng Xiaoping, and other notables with whom he treated during his 35 years in China. The gripping saga of an expatriate whose extraordinary experiences left him without illusions about Marxism—but with his personal ideals triumphantly intact. (Eight pages of b&w photographs, one map—not seen)
Pub Date: April 19, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-73595-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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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