An engaging, comprehensible cross-section of the personalities and cultural concerns rising with China’s ascent.
Understanding China’s trajectory through the lives of its aggressive yet wary top achievers.
Like many of her subjects, Jianying Zha (China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture, 1995) has a fraught relationship with her homeland. Born in Beijing, she received a scholarship to the University of South Carolina, then returned to China. Since then, she’s established herself intellectually in both societies. Her cultural survey The Eighties was a surprise bestseller in China; in America, she endeavors to “keep focused on the Chinese to explain China.” This book is divided into two sections, “The Entrepreneurs” and “The Intellectuals,” built around narratives and interviews with individuals who have prospered during the last two decades of economic reform, yet remain mindful of the Chinese state’s authoritarianism. The entrepreneurs include a “good tycoon” whose mother was executed during the Cultural Revolution for criticizing Mao; after he’d made a fortune in appliance marketing, he devoted his energy to clearing her name. A chapter on married real-estate developers, nicknamed “The Turtles,” provides a good window into Chinese-style gentrification: “Developers are regarded as China’s robber barons, men who have taken advantage of the muddled transition to capitalism by means of guanxi (connections), bribery, and fraud.” In the second section, the author examines how Peking University (China’s premier university) and esteemed writers and critics are weathering the tides of transformation. She reveals a more personal connection to the country’s ongoing turmoil, in that her brother, once an ardent Maoist, served a 9-year prison sentence for “subverting the state.” The author argues that despite searing recollections of Tiananmen, a new consensus has formed against political activism, given that marketplace reforms have raised 400 million Chinese out of poverty. Overall, she presents a crisply narrated panorama of the strange journey taken by her generation of Chinese, who’ve gone “from being Mao’s little red children to bitterly disillusioned adults.”
An engaging, comprehensible cross-section of the personalities and cultural concerns rising with China’s ascent.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59558-620-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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