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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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