A moving evocation of life in a remote village in China in the 1960s and ’70s. The Chens had the misfortune to be descended from a landlord, and the consequences followed all the descendants, even the grandchildren, as ineluctably as race in the worst days of the old South. Their property was confiscated, they were forbidden to go to school, they could be abused and beaten up with impunity by their neighbors, their father was sent to a work camp, and most of the children worked for long hours in the fields, “farming the land the same way we had done thousands of years ago, the only difference being that we got paid less.— And yet, for all the cruelty and humiliation, there is an exuberance about this book. The Chens— remote village escaped—was hardly even aware of—the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, China itself was changing. Chen was allowed to go to school, and even though he was persecuted and victimized, and on one occasion had to escape to another village to avoid being branded a counterrevolutionary, his school and village took occasional pride in his achievements. Chen taught himself to play the violin and consorted with local toughs who discouraged the school bullies. All the while, his family, even by Chinese standards, remained exceptionally loving and supportive. His father’s talent for acupuncture was so helpful to the party hierarchy that he was discharged from the work camp, credited with a miraculous repentance. Chen’s triumph comes after the Cultural Revolution, when college places are opened up to competitive examinations, regardless of class status, and he wins the supreme prize of a place at the Beijing Language Institute. Chen’s memoir displays an unusual and remarkable insight into Chinese life, and into the resilience of the human spirit. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50288-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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
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