An ancillary but meaningful document of a time too little chronicled and now all but forgotten by younger Chinese people.
Scarifying account of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
What brought about the revolution, apart from Mao’s constantly stirring things up to keep friends and enemies alike off balance? Ji (1911-2009) doesn’t profess to know, but he’s irritated at those who do have the answers and won’t release them: “I think their refusal,” he writes, “runs contrary to the attitude of truth-seeking that a materialist should have.” Whole worlds are encapsulated in that sentence, for the author remained until his death a supporter of the Communist state. That makes the events of June 1966 all the more incomprehensible to an outsider. It was then that he was branded a “reactionary capitalist academic authority” and initiated in a regime that in the months to come would involve questioning, haranguing, abuse, criticism, and self-criticism. The author allows that he had been the department head of an Asian languages program for 20 years, and given that the mob of Red Guards surrounding him wasn’t likely to leave him in peace, he selected the label that fit him most closely. The Red Guards were thorough in the extreme; they accused him of being insufficiently ardent by virtue of the fact that his portrait of the Great Leader wasn’t dusty. But Ji, never quite playing along—some degree of resistance, he later lets slip, was crucial to survival—replied that it wasn’t dusty because he cherished it so much that he polished it constantly. It was off to the metaphorical cowshed all the same. A bestseller in China, this memoir calls attention to the tremendous injustices wrought in that anarchic time. Western readers may find themselves unsold by the author’s too-frequent protestations that in recounting his tribulations, he means his former accusers and abusers no harm. Still, that seems a mere formula, for his pages seethe with grievance and reckoning.
An ancillary but meaningful document of a time too little chronicled and now all but forgotten by younger Chinese people.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59017-927-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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