An often harrowing, valuable account for students of daily life in the early years of the period culminating in China’s...
An early victim of Mao Zedong’s totalitarian regime is swept up in a time of terror.
“Under Mao Zedong’s dictatorship,” writes Xu, “the Chinese people had no human rights. My history is a good example of this.” So it is. By this account, which seems to have enjoyed only modest success in its Chinese edition, Xu, born in 1933, was a loyal Communist cadre who had “personally experienced the injustice and darkness of the old society.” Two events conspired to put him in the cross hairs: Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin’s legacy in the Soviet Union and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, both of which furthered Mao’s paranoia and inspired a program of constant purges. Running afoul of truer believers than he, Xu, a so-called class traitor, was sent to a labor camp in 1958, where he was beleaguered with the usual denunciations: “Your heinous crimes have caused great losses to the people!” Amazingly, he managed to escape, if only temporarily, and more than once. The path he charted each time was the most tortuous possible, intended to shake off pursuers. When, in 1972, he succeeded, he traveled from near the Burmese border to his mother’s home in Shanghai, then crossed into Mongolia, where he lived for several years in exile until, after Mao’s death, he thought it safe to return home. Xu’s narrative is of interest as a survivor’s account of the camps in those early years of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which would precede a time of famine and then the Cultural Revolution. It is of less interest as an adventure yarn, for the narrative is rather flat, without the dramatic pacing of, say, Papillon or Slavomir Rawicz’s genre-defining The Long Walk (1955).
An often harrowing, valuable account for students of daily life in the early years of the period culminating in China’s little-documented civil war of the 1970s.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-21262-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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