An unusual and often absorbing memoir of China and its leaders by a woman who, in 1956 when she was eight, was sent there with her older brother to serve as a ``bridge'' between two ostensibly hostile nations—her adopted country and her native Thailand. After a slow start that details the history of her father, a powerful Thai politician, Phathanothai conveys the shock of China's privations to her privileged self, recalls the restrictions of life as a protected ``special guest,'' and tells much about Zhou Enlai, a friend of her father's. In the beginning of her third year, her pro-China father was arrested by the US-leaning Thai leadership. Now ``one of the Chinese people's children,'' in Zhou's words, she joined in the labors of the Great Leap Forward and gained entrÇe to the homes of the elite, learning the difference between Zhou's public and private words and hearing Mao's explanation that Communism was but one theory China had to try. Though she saw her recently freed father in 1967, the author's happiness was short- lived: China, in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, denounced him and expelled her brother. Given ten minutes to decide, and unwilling to ``abandon the people who had taken [her] in,'' Sirin chose to stay and mouth denunciations of her brother and father. She then went into hiding in the countryside under an assumed name, worked in a Beijing textile factory, and finally left China in 1970 with her English fiancÇ. Phathanothai now lives in Paris with her second husband, the Dutch ambassador. Co-author Peck directs the US-China Book Publications Project at Yale University Press. With such strong affection for China and sympathy for its leaders, Phathanothai can't bring herself to condemn the Tiananmen Square massacre. Less excusable is her sketchy description of her reconciliation with her father and brother, who both apparently bore her little ill will. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-79546-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
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
SEEN & HEARD
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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