A useful work that elucidates both the U.S. role in China and some elements of the contemporary conservative mindset.
A serious probe into the life of the Baptist missionary to China who posthumously (and thus unwittingly) served as the right wing’s poster child.
Who was the real John Birch (1918-1945)? Academic Lautz, who grew up in Taiwan and later became a scholar of Asia, was curious enough to delve deeply into the brief life of this young missionary and U.S. intelligence officer who was killed by the Chinese communists at the age of 27. The author situates Birch—who made his way to China in 1940 at the behest of a charismatic preacher to take up the work of training Chinese children to become Christian—squarely in the center of the political tensions between U.S.–backed Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists, both battling the Japanese invaders. Although Birch, brought up by a strong-willed mother and failed missionary father, only desired to be a simple fundamentalist preacher saving souls in rural China, he volunteered for the U.S. military in 1942 and was put to work in gathering intelligence for the Office of Strategic Services, which eventually led to his untimely death. Lautz also explores the co-opting of Birch’s life by conspiracy-minded conservatives like Republican California Sen. William F. Knowland, who believed the “loss of China” would spell a communist conquest of the whole region and first mentioned the young man’s name in a speech in Congress in September 1950 as “the first casualty of World War III.” Subsequently, Birch’s name would become synonymous as a martyr to the Cold War, ardently endorsed by his mother. His life was appropriated by businessman Robert Welch, who broadcast the myths about him and started the John Birch Society in 1958 (“less government, more responsibility, and a better world”). Lautz sorts the real story from the “lunatic fringe.”
A useful work that elucidates both the U.S. role in China and some elements of the contemporary conservative mindset.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-026289-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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