An ambitious swath of Hong Kong social history, notable for particular insights about Eurasian entrepreneurs and dynasties.
A new history of Hong Kong, emphasizing the early traders and strivers of mixed ethnic backgrounds who shaped its singular development.
“Hong Kong was precisely the handy kind of small but clever place always needed on the edge of huge empires—hideaway and refuge, petri dish or sewer, and always a service stop providing fuel of all kinds for next ventures,” writes England, who has been a journalist in East Asia for years. Located around a spectacular deep-sea harbor, Hong Kong has served as a convenient outpost for the empowered British Empire after the Napoleonic Wars as well as an entrepôt for the “newly unemployed, adventurous young men, ready to explore the seven seas.” While the majority of Hong Kongers were then and still are ethnically Chinese, England is keenly interested in what has attracted others to the city and the kinds of industry and family dynasties they created over the decades. After the British first visited Hong Kong in 1839, it became a hub on the thriving trade route, it had been a hub on the thriving trade route for centuries, attracting Jews, Parsis, Armenians, Indians, Malays, Filipinos, and the Tanka and Hakka people of China, all of whom were drawn to the myriad opportunities and created a mosaic of diversity. The author also shows how it became a place of refuge. “Chinese fled the Taiping Rebellion on the mainland, they fled poverty, women fled total control, and people left Macao, and South and Southeast Asia, in hopes of making their fortune in Hong Kong.” As Chinese nationalism grew, tensions increased between those who valued the strength of diverse ethnicity and those who sought to maintain racial purity. England clearly delineates her deep research into Eurasian dynasties and moves more quickly through the Japanese occupation and British handover.
An ambitious swath of Hong Kong social history, notable for particular insights about Eurasian entrepreneurs and dynasties.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781982184513
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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