Despite some unanswered questions, a copiously researched history and a page-turning read. Fong See, the author's Chinese great-grandfather, came to the US as a teenager in 1871. Lisa See's first book takes us through his marriage to a white woman, Letticie Pruett; decades as a Californian entrepreneur (initially selling underwear to prostitutes, later becoming a renowned dealer of rare Chinese antiques); subsequent marriages to much younger Chinese women; 12 children; and numerous trips back to China. The family personalities come alive in See's historythe Prohibition-era alcoholics, the lonely white women who married See men, Letticie's refusal to be a traditionally obedient Chinese wife (though in many ways she identified with Chinese people, once explaining to a white visitor why ``we'' do not like to be called ``Chinamen''), and Fong See's Eurasian sons, whose ``exotic'' looks helped them become dashing Los Angeles playboys. See also provides admirable historical context, always taking stock of political developments in both the US and China and explaining how they might have affected her family. Using interviews, government records, newspaper clippings, and sales slips, among other documents, See has constructed an absorbing multigenerational family saga. The narrative is marred only by a tendency to push the boundaries of fictionalization. All biographers have to do some guesswork, but See at times frustrates by not telling us how much of her account is speculation. For instance, in the chapter on actress Anna May Wong, dubiously titled ``Anna May Speaks (From the Grave),'' it is clear that See has made up Wong's words, but her sourcing doesn't reveal how much she knows about the real Anna May's thoughts and feelings. Fact/fiction ambiguities aside, an invaluable document of immigrant experience that raises complex questions about identity in American culture. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11997-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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