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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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