Shortness is not a prerequisite for enjoying Hall’s work, but concerned parents of short boys will find it particularly...
Combining his own experiences, interviews with other men and the findings of various researchers, the author artfully reveals the ways in which male stature matters.
A science journalist (Merchants of Mortality, 2003, etc.), Hall writes with feeling about a subject dear to his heart: the modern obsession with tallness. He frankly shares the downsides of being a small, late-maturing adolescent—becoming the victim of bullying, for example—while pointing out that one of its blessings is that facing such adversities can lead to keener development of an emotional intelligence. Among the subjects he explores are human growth charts; puberty and the adolescent growth spurt; and the historic roots of society’s admiration for tallness. Calling the cultural preference for tallness “the Prussian curse,” he details the measures taken by the height-obsessed King Frederick William of Prussia to build up a force of extraordinarily tall soldiers, measures that included kidnapping tall men from other countries. Hall argues that while size does matter, environment matters just as much, and he finds simplistic the reports on the height of CEOs that equate tallness with leadership qualities, pointing to research indicating that it is the height of a boy at age 16 that influences future wages. Timing of growth, he says, isn’t everything, but it is very important. Hall also points out that while height says nothing about the character of an individual, average height of a population says a great deal about the values of society. While average height has remained stagnant in the United States since World War II, it has increased in other industrialized areas, e.g., Germany, England and the Scandinavian countries, suggesting a greater attention there to social equality and better health care.
Shortness is not a prerequisite for enjoying Hall’s work, but concerned parents of short boys will find it particularly reassuring.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-47040-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.
The ably reconstructed story of the author’s convoluted escape from North Korea, detailing the hardships of life there and the serendipity of flight.
A supremely determined young woman, Lee chronicles her life in North Korea and her defection in her late teens in 1998. With the assistance of co-author John, she re-creates a picaresque tale of incredible, suspenseful, and truly death-defying adventures, which eventually led her to asylum in South Korea and then America. The author grew up largely in the northeast province of Ryanggang, bordering the Yalu River with China, and her family home was in Hyesan. Her father was a privileged member of the military, and her enterprising mother was a successful trader on the black market. The family, including younger brother Min-ho, did not endure the hardships of famine like people of low songbun, or caste, but the author learned that her father was not her biological father only shortly before he died by suicide after being trailed by security, beaten, and imprisoned in her mid-teens. Her mother had previously married and divorced another man. At age 17, the lights of China, directly across the river, beckoned, and the author managed to cross and establish contact first with a trading partner of her mother’s, then dissident relatives of her father’s in Shenyang. While the author had no intention of leaving her mother, it was apparent that it was too dangerous for her to return. Her relatives shielded her for a few years, trying to arrange a marriage with a wealthy Korean-Chinese man, from whom the author fled at the eleventh hour. Working as a waitress in Shanghai afforded some invisibility, though she was always susceptible to con men and security police. As the narrative progresses, the author’s trials grow ever more astounding, especially as she eventually tried to get her mother and brother out of North Korea.
Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-00-755483-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
The collected "pieces" of the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain form a compelling unit as he applies the high drama of poetry and sociology to a penetrating analysis of the Negro experience on the American and European scene.
He bares the brutal boners of "everybody's protest novel" from Stowe to Wright; points out that black is "devil-color" according to Christian theology and to "make white" is thus to save; reveals the positive base of Carmen Jones, movie version, as Negroes are white, that is, moral. Beyond such artistic attitudinal displays lie experimental realities: the Harlem Ghetto with its Negro press, the positive element of which tries to emulate the white press and provides an incongruous mixture of slick style and stark subject; the Ghetto with its churches and its hatred of the American reality behind the Jewish face (from which, as sufferers, so much was expected). There is a trip to Atlanta for the Wallace campaign and indignities endured; there is a beautiful essay, from which the book takes its title- of father and son and the corroding power of hate as it could grow from injustice. In Europe, there is the encounter of African and American Negro; a sojourn in jail over a stolen sheet; and last, the poignant essay of the first Negro to come to a remote Swiss village, to be greeted as a living wonder. This is not true in America, where he has a place, though equivocal, in our united life.
The expression of so many insights enriches rather than clarifies, and behind every page stalks a man, an everyman, seeking his identity...and ours. Exceptional writing.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1955
ISBN: 0807064319
Page Count: -
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1955
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