A masterful blend of personal, family, and national history set against the backdrop of South Korea's long fight for independence and democracy. Kang, a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, combines fastidious academic research and personal recollection to create a vibrant, often disturbing account of a country caught in a centuries-long clash between world superpowers. The period of Japanese colonialism is embodied in the story of Kang's paternal grandfather, Myong-Hwan Kang, whose mind and spirit were shattered when he was twice arrested and tortured for nationalist activities. Celebration over the end of Japanese domination with their loss in WW II was interrupted by the outbreak of the Korean War. In 1946, when Kang was three, she and her mother escaped from their home in the north, going first to Seoul and then to a refugee camp in Pusan; they waited there over a year for passports so that they could rejoin Kang's father in Tokyo, where he was working as an interpreter for the American government. Finally, the two made an illegal crossing and were detained by the Japanese and finally released on bond, still without passports. Kang walks the line between Korean, Japanese, and American culture, and is acutely aware of the tensions among these separate worlds. As a woman she is intellectually attracted to the freedom inherent in American culture, but emotionally she is drawn toward her country of birth, despite its complex social hierarchies. When her parents join her in San Francisco in 1975, they are forced to start from scratch in a new country that does not credit them for past victories. The two buy a grocery store and are perceived like many other Korean immigrants—as if they come from a race of storekeepers who have little other experience. Deft and timely, this helps dispel many misconceptions about one of our nation's least understood immigrant populations.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-201-62684-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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