A masterly work that advances by salient themes and vigorous strokes.
A barbed biography, relentless and occasionally sarcastic, reveals the many problematic facets of the long-lived revolutionary and reformer Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997).
Unlike Ezra F. Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011), which focuses on the last third of the premier’s life and is faulted by historians Pantsov (Capital Univ.) and Levine (Univ. of Montana) for not being critical enough of its subject, this work by the co-authors of Mao: The Real Story (2012) looks more extensively at Deng’s formative years under Mao Zedong, using newly available material from the Russian State Archives and other sources. Beginning their account with the bloody purging of the student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989—an order given by Deng to crush the “counterrevolutionary rebellion”—the authors take great pains to delineate the makeup of a leader so inculcated by Maoist authoritarian ways that he would sacrifice everything to the communist cause, including his cherished reforms. Indeed, this would be the refrain of his remarkably resilient career, from his first repudiation of his adoring parents when he joined the Bolshevik movement as a student in Paris in the early 1920s to his sycophantic appeasement under Mao during the disastrous Great Leap. The authors emphasize that Deng embraced communism as a youth because he was “ready for anything that would help redress the insults and injuries inflicted upon him by the capitalist world.” He became an obedient soldier of the Chinese Communist Party and, as chief of the Southwest Region during the 1950s, helped solidify the repression of Tibet and galvanize agrarian reform. Caught up in the “utopian hysteria” dictated by Mao, Deng nonetheless began to recognize the need to oppose the leader without compromising his own position. His skillful dance during the Cultural Revolution, when he was denounced, arrested and exiled, yet re-emerged rehabilitated, provides a valuable key to this enigmatic leader.
A masterly work that advances by salient themes and vigorous strokes.Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-939203-2
Page Count: 676
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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