Multilayered, provocative and highly accessible, this will appeal to Chan fans, scholars and general readers.
China-born poet and critic Huang (English/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara/Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics, 2008, etc.) recounts the making of an American folk hero.
Debuting as a minor character in novelist Earl Derr Biggers’ The House Without a Key (1925), Charlie Chan attained enormous popularity through six novels and nearly 50 films, as well as radio dramas and a comic strip, creating what the author calls a “tortured legacy in American culture, a legacy that at once endears and offends millions.” By the late ’40s, the genial, aphorism-spouting detective was firmly established as a funny, beloved figure, or as a Yellow Uncle Tom, depending on one’s point of view. In this original, deeply personal account, Huang illuminates every conceivable aspect of Chan and his place in American culture. His vibrant narrative tells the stories of Biggers, a newspaperman turned novelist, who created Chan as an alternative to Sax Rohmer’s villainous character Fu Manchu; Chang Apana, a legendary, crime-busting Chinese cop in Honolulu who wore a Panama hat, carried a bullwhip and became the real-life basis for Chan; and the fictional Chan, who entered American popular culture just as nativists succeeded in pushing through anti-Chinese immigrant legislation. Chan was played in hit movies by Swedish actor Warner Oland and others and has been vehemently dismissed in recent years as nothing more than a racial stereotype by author and playwright Frank Chin and other prominent Asian Americans. Huang takes a balanced view. Chan is a racist stereotype, he writes, but he is also a folk hero, exemplifying the “cultural miscegenation” that critic Stanley Crouch calls “the catalyst of the American experience.” The author makes a convincing case for Chan’s place in film history not as an Uncle Tom but rather as one in a line of wise detectives with eccentricities, including Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. An appendix offers more than 50 “Charlie Chanisms.”
Multilayered, provocative and highly accessible, this will appeal to Chan fans, scholars and general readers.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06962-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
