An often engaging story of a Chinese journey that’s worth telling.
A Canadian-born radical leftist and freelance broadcast journalist offers a debut memoir of her year in Communist China, where she edited English-language propaganda for Radio Beijing.
Pellett did well to delay publishing the story of her 1980 sojourn in post-Cultural Revolution Beijing. Had she published it sooner after returning to the United States, where she’s since spent most of her life working in media, she might have jeopardized the Chinese friends, colleagues, and lovers in these somewhat self-absorbed but highly engaging pages. She and her friends were under continual surveillance in a post-Mao Chinese society that was very unlike the workers’ “Little Red Book” utopia she might have imagined during her stint as a New Left revolutionary in America during the late 1960s and early ’70s. The authoritarian reality in 1980 China was one of very little personal privacy and an abundance of informants. She soon learned that talking with people while biking was the best way to avoid being overheard. As a hard-drinking, single, Western woman of 37 with red hair, lusty appetites, a stack of blues and jazz cassettes, and a propensity for asking leading questions, she attracted rabid attention. It’s no surprise that her quest for human connection, which was hampered by her inability to read or speak Mandarin, was risky for the Chinese people she met, due to Communist Party prohibitions against consorting with foreigners. Indeed, she reports that under Deng Xiaoping, campaigns against “bourgeois liberalization” and “Spiritual Pollution” later led to a million arrests and 24,000 executions. Still, she richly remembers some of the people who dared cross the line and interact with her. She also provides a marvelously deft view of street life in Beijing and other parts of China during the time of her visit. She pays less attention here to her humdrum job as a foreign expert at Radio Beijing, a state-run international broadcaster spouting the party line in four dozen languages. Readers can only marvel at her naïve realization that her colleagues weren’t really journalists and that she was “working for a propaganda institution rather than a journalistic agency.”
An often engaging story of a Chinese journey that’s worth telling.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-934395-59-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: VanDam Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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