American readers might prefer more details about the couple’s life in China and America, but this is not the author’s...
A Chinese journalist now living in the US tries to make sense of his life after a tragedy.
Su Xiaokang fled China soon after the 1989 Tianenmen Square massacre. His wife and son remained behind but after two years were permitted to join him. It seemed their struggles were over; then an auto accident left his wife paralyzed and unable to speak. This memoir of her long, agonizing recovery, a process still far from complete, is both an elegy to the author’s beloved wife and an effort to understand himself. Despite a decade in the US, Su has shed little of his native culture. He lives and socializes largely in the Chinese exile community, speaking little English. As a result, his account mixes universal elements with Chinese cultural attitudes that may seem strange to American readers. Westerners tend to feel that catastrophes just happen, but even sophisticated Chinese see life as teeming with unseen influences, omens, luck, and subtle portents. The author searches his past at great length for hints that he stupidly ignored. He finds plenty, including the warning of a teashop owner with psychic abilities who told Su he’d have an auto accident at 45. He finds deep significance in his wife’s past unhappiness with his friends, his political activities, and especially her fears of riding in cars. He recounts dreams. She regains speech and some movement but remains wheelchair-bound. From prayer and faith healers to a host of Asian techniques from acupuncture to qigong to meditation, they search desperately for a cure. Ultimately, both realize they can never return to life as it was before the accident, but much good remains to be experienced.
American readers might prefer more details about the couple’s life in China and America, but this is not the author’s purpose. He has written not so much an autobiography as a painful rumination on fate.Pub Date: April 25, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41039-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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 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
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