A hardy, useful work of journalism.
In 16 punchy, occasionally underdeveloped essays, a young American journalist who has lived and studied in China spotlights some of the marginal types whose stories reveal a lot about this drastically changing country.
For better or worse, these are the faces of the new China: slackers running tourist bars in the idyllic hippie capital of Dali; ubiquitous prostitutes, estimated at one in ten women of the total population; students at the best universities resigned to cheating and noncritical thinking; ostracized homosexuals; addicts of ketamine and role-playing games; mafia kingpins; journalists and artists who bravely expose a still-fascist government. Mexico moves fluidly through the country’s highly stratified society. In the first essay, “The Peasant Who Likes to Take Pictures,” the author profiles the elusive photojournalist Maohair, whose pictures showing victims of mine explosions, migrant workers demanding back wages and environmental disasters chronicle the human toll of China’s devastating growth. In “The Black Society,” Mexico pursues a Chinese businessman whose tentacles extend into the crooked rackets of construction, karaoke parlors and seafood markets. In “The Killers,” Mexico infiltrates a complicated role-playing game called the Killing People Club, in which players obsessively enact rituals of masochism. The author, reflecting on the silence surrounding the Cultural Revolution, wonders if this is a way “for educated Chinese citizens to subvert their history as victims and to become, briefly and metaphorically, the oppressor?” Mexico doesn’t tip-toe around troubling issues of racism, in the form of the Chinese treatment of the Uighur minority and the immigrant Nigerians, and censorship, such as the government’s silence around the spread of AIDS and rampant environmental pollution. His work forms an invaluable auxiliary to more rosy official guides in navigating a perplexing culture.
A hardy, useful work of journalism.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59376-223-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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