by Xinran translated by William Spencer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 2019
A minor but graceful work that restores a lost generation to history.
Love in a time of totalitarianism.
“The past century has seen more upheaval than any other time in the 5,000-year-old history of Chinese civilization,” writes Xinran (Buy Me the Sky: The Remarkable Truth of China's One-Child Generations, 2015, etc.), a London-based journalist whose books have focused on social mores and family life in her homeland. “The ways in which people show love for each other have also changed in the face of war and cultural development.” One such change is an emphasis on “talking love.” Since public displays of affection are not commonplace and privacy is difficult to secure, it is a way of falling in love by conversing and negotiating. So the dictionary says, though Xinran insists it is far less clinical than all that. By way of illustration, she examines the course of a single family over a century, beginning with the marriage of a man and woman in 1919 who then went on to produce nine children whom they named after favorite colors: Orange, Green, Cyan, and so forth. Getting to their stories, as Xinran writes, required navigating difficult tangles of emotion; so psychically painful were many of the events of war and revolution that older Chinese people invent less terrible pasts for themselves, a comfort to the memory but one that weighs against historical accuracy. Of the pre-revolutionary generation, those memories are of a country that no longer exists. The child named Red, for instance, was contracted in marriage when she was just 9: “My marriage sentence began that day,” she tells Xinran quietly, later remembering an argument from long ago over whether to believe newspaper accounts of the Korean War. Relates Green, three of the siblings went abroad, three remained in Communist China, and “three met death before their time.” Their descendants now live much different lives, including a young woman who studied in the U.S. and dates an American whom she met there: "Doesn’t it sound just like a love story from a movie?”
A minor but graceful work that restores a lost generation to history.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78831-362-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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by Xinran translated by Nicky Harman
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by Xinran & translated by Esther Tyldesley & Nicky Harman & Julia Lovell
by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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