Entertaining, informative adventures of a woman determined to understand the people of China.
One woman’s experiences while living and writing in China.
Often, the only way to fully understand a foreign country is to actually live in that country for a time. After years of travel around the world, Collinsworth (It Might Have Been What He Said, 2007) found herself drawn once again to China, a country she had visited on many occasions over a period of years. Fascinated by its culture and people, she moved to Beijing with her son, Gilliam, and set out to understand its nuances. “Like a complicated mathematical equation I was determined to solve, China called me back numerous times…” she writes. “There came many adventures, but only one revelation: I would remain forever and beguilingly mystified by the Middle Kingdom.” Based on her observations, she decided the Chinese needed a book on how to interact with Western men and women, so she wrote a guidebook called The Tao of Improving Your Likability: A Personal Guide to Effective Business Etiquette in Today’s Global World. In the process of writing the book, Collinsworth discovered many aspects about her own business relationships that required deeper scrutiny, which she explores here. She also incorporates details of her life with her son prior to her move to China. As he grew into adulthood, they traveled around the world, which proved an eclectic and enlightening education for both of them. Collinsworth’s observations bring the Chinese and their rituals and history to life, and she adroitly circles each chapter around in order to weave in lessons from her Tao handbook as well. These topics include everything from how to shake hands with a man or woman to proper table manners to how to graciously accept an apology or a compliment.
Entertaining, informative adventures of a woman determined to understand the people of China.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53869-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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