Sensitive, fascinating reports.
Novelistic anecdotes reveal Chinese young people struggling with universal themes of education, employment, and love.
In alternating chapters, Beijing-based British journalist Ash (co-editor: While We're Here: China Stories from a Writers' Colony, 2016) pursues the mostly unglamorous, daily slogs of six young Chinese, born from 1985 to 1990, and how, as the single-child generation, they are making their ways in the new China. Initially, readers must work to remember which character is which, and some have English nicknames. There is art student Xiaoxiao, from the northernmost Heilongjiang province; academically gifted Fred, the daughter of Communist party apparatchiks in China’s far south island, Hainan; gaming addict Snail, from Anhui province; Dahai, from Wuhan, who was forced to study computer science and settled for a stable team-leader position building a tunnel under Beijing; Mia, a rebel who scored a stylist job at the Chinese edition of Harper’s Bazaar; and Lucifer, who scraped by at Peking University and only wanted to be a rock star. Each dreamed of the good life, undergoing the rigorous exams for university and attending college and then joining the massive work force as “just another worker ant.” Some, like Snail and Dahai, discovered power in venting on the internet (“reposting is power”). Lucifer found gratification in joining bands and screaming English lyrics, and Mia delved into the fashionista club scene. Forced to live frugally, Snail inhabited one of the tiny spaces in the basements of cheap apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city, living with other members of the underclass called the “rat tribe.” Fred, a graduate student in politics, did a year abroad at Cornell University; while she was intrigued by the American way, she was not tempted to stay. By their late 20s, all young people are expected to get married; a few of Ash’s subjects obliged, to enormous cost and fanfare by their delighted parents. Ultimately, the author eloquently delineates the dreams and disappointments of young Chinese.
Sensitive, fascinating reports.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62872-764-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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