Without a chronology, an autobiography that reprises the high and low points of a life can make for a riveting but at times...
A first English translation of an autobiography whose initial volume was published in 1936 in Shanghai introduces a feisty woman warrior who defied—not always successfully—her autocratic traditional family, wrote prolifically, served on the front, and loved passionately.
Xie Bingying, born in 1906 in a Chinese village (and died in 2000 in San Francisco, where she had lived since 1974), lived in proverbially interesting times—as Warlords and Nationalist and Communist forces fought for power and Japan invaded. A romantic idealist rather than cold-blooded theoretician, Xie ruefully recalls her life from childhood until the 1938 Japanese invasion, when she nursed soldiers at the front. The daughter of a scholar, who taught her to read, she was determined not to be a conventional woman of the period. Though she deeply loved her equally strong-willed mother, she strongly resisted having her feet bound—but to no avail. Then, when her mother refused to let her continue her education, she threatened suicide. Betrothed since childhood to a neighbor’s son, Xie again tried to defy her mother when the marriage was to take place. She ran away, was caught, held prisoner, and eventually went through with the ceremony in 1927, though the marriage was soon annulled. Xie moved to Beijing, had lovers, and bore an illegitimate daughter. Even before the marriage, however, Xie was writing for progressive publications, had joined a regiment in Chiang Kai-shek’s army, and fought the feudal warlords. She later studied in Japan to study, was imprisoned briefly for her political views, and, back in China, continued to write and teach. Despite intimidation, poverty, and often near-starvation, Xie continued fearlessly to fight for change and women’s rights.
Without a chronology, an autobiography that reprises the high and low points of a life can make for a riveting but at times confusing story. Nonetheless, this is an evocative self-portrait of a Chinese woman who really was a warrior.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-231-12250-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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