Mingles a scholar’s detachment with bemused sadness at the cruelties of a troubled and furious history.
English-language publication of dissident writer Liao’s “interviews with people from the bottom rung of society,” a 2001 bestseller in China until the government banned it.
Working with the author, translator Wen selected 27 pieces representative of the unabridged Chinese work that would interest Western readers, adding background information to clarify the political and historical references. The interviews cover a broad cross-section of Chinese society—the kind of people who never turn up in tourist literature, official press releases or the accounts of Western journalists focusing on a small number of dissidents. Officially unemployable after a four-year prison stint for protesting the suppression of the pro-democracy movement, poet, novelist and screenwriter Liao began talking to others at the bottom of the labor force. Some of the most illuminating chapters are devoted to people with jobs that are either peculiar (a performer of mournful music at funerals) or illegal (the former leader of a sex-trafficking ring). Liao never actually met a “corpse walker,” but a nonagenarian family friend told him stories about people who risked punishment for engaging in “business connected with tradition and superstition” by carrying dead bodies back to their hometowns to be buried in their native soil, as custom demanded. Many interviews reveal the horrors and/or stupidities of communism. A retired Party official saw the Great Leap Forward lead to famine and even cannibalism in a rural section of Sichuan province. Grandpa Zhou, who worked in a public restroom in the city of Chengdu, found waste disposal a perfectly respectable job, but the intellectuals and professors who were labeled counter-revolutionaries and forced to clean toilets during the Cultural Revolution did not. Many of them couldn’t take the loss of status, Zhou recalled, “and hanged themselves with their belts inside the toilet stalls.” Other chapters show political decrees provoking radical personal changes.
Mingles a scholar’s detachment with bemused sadness at the cruelties of a troubled and furious history.Pub Date: April 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42542-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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