While the story sometimes reads like an intercultural soap opera, it is the author’s courage to face her mistakes that makes...
An American freelance journalist’s painful account of how a hasty marriage to a Chinese man turned her life upside down.
Blumberg-Kason was a “shy Midwestern wallflower” going to graduate school in Hong Kong when she met her future husband. With his intelligence, confidence and movie-star looks, Cai seemed a dream come true. He engaged her as his English tutor and, a few months later, declared his desire to date and marry her. The author assented, blind to what it would mean to become the wife of a Chinese man she barely knew. Before the pair even married, Cai’s parents told her they would take care of the baby they had not yet had—with or without her. Immediately after the wedding, the formerly “gentle” Cai was “more interested in watching porn than being with [her].” His bad behavior only worsened, as he became moody, demanding and verbally abusive. Believing that Cai’s outbursts were simply the result of a need to acclimate to married life, Blumberg-Kason resolved to "dance [her] way around future eruptions.” But their relationship grew even more riddled with problems, one of which involved a too-close-for-comfort relationship between Cai and one of his male professors. Lonely and unable to tolerate the social and interpersonal norms of mainland Chinese culture, Blumberg-Kason moved to San Francisco with her husband. But the perfect life she still dreamed of eluded her. Even the author’s longed-for baby became a source of cross-cultural conflict between her and her husband. Dissatisfied with American life, Cai demanded that their son go back to China with him. Only then did Blumberg-Kason realize that accommodating her husband would cause her to lose the one thing that had redeemed an otherwise dysfunctional marriage.
While the story sometimes reads like an intercultural soap opera, it is the author’s courage to face her mistakes that makes the book worthwhile.Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-9334-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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