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
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
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