Confucius finally gets his due. Chin sticks to the facts as she can discern them and lets the master speak for himself.
A wonderfully streamlined, agenda-free biography of China’s greatest intellectual.
Chin (Four Sisters of Hofei, 2002, etc.) corrects centuries of misquoting, projection, over-analysis and general wrongheadedness about the words and thoughts of Confucius (551–479 BCE). Exerting to this day an indescribable influence on China, he is so intertwined with its state and society that it seems impossible to see the man anymore, much less understand what he was trying to say. “We give him credit for all that has gone right and wrong in China because we do not really know him,” Chin writes. Few facts are available about his life, and the gaps have often, at times fancifully, been filled by disciples writing centuries later. Chin eschews this temptation, concentrating instead on what is known—or what she at least thinks she knows—about his life and teachings. Born as a common gentleman—meaning that he could be educated but otherwise would have to make his own way in the world—Confucius seems to have spent a good deal of his life in service to various courts. He moved frequently, not always for clear reasons, and often had around him a group of students willing to act as foils for his philosophical wit. A true scholar, Confucius had a few core beliefs but no overarching set of ideas to which he tried to force all situations to bend. (Chin approves.) Revered for his wisdom and humility, he nevertheless had a pragmatic side: “I have never refused to teach anyone who approaches me on his own with a bundle of dried meat.”
Confucius finally gets his due. Chin sticks to the facts as she can discern them and lets the master speak for himself.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-4618-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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
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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