Nineteen years in Mao's labor camps—as chronicled by Wu (resident scholar at the Hoover Institution) and Wakeman (To the Storm—not reviewed). When the Communist forces took Shanghai in 1948, Wu (then 11) was living in a milieu of Western affluence and traditional culture. Although his father was a high-ranking bank official, the family remained in China, and in 1955 Wu, eager to build the new socialist society, went to the Beijing Geology Institute. He was devoted to his studies and to baseball, but he soon found that college life was dominated by political activities. His middle- class background and independent mind meant that he was repeatedly denounced for holding wrong opinions, even though he accepted Communism, and in April 1960, the morning after his graduation, he was summarily arrested as a political criminal and made to undergo reeducation through labor. His narrative takes us through years of deprivation, torture, and starvation in a world where the dead were carted out daily and the living were bombarded with ideological slogans. Among many others, we meet the peasant thief Xing, who teaches the young intellectual Wu the art of survival; and Lu, who loses his hope and sanity before finally succeeding in suicide. Wu was sustained by the insight that in such a world human life had no value, that the society was rotten if people didn't count, and that he would have a purpose if he tried to change that society. And thus, after his release and emigration to this country, he risked everything by returning to China in disguise with a CBS camera crew, and now has written this book. As an addition to the genre of Gulag literature, a remarkable and heroic story, recounted with great simplicity and nobility.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-55645-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
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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