The book reflects the tone of its author: clear, honest and unassuming.
A Chinese-American businesswoman's memoir of exile, torture, immigration and, ultimately, astounding success.
With the assistance of Huffington Post blogger Fox (Fortytude: Making the Next Decades the Best Years of Your Life, 2011, etc.), Ping Fu, founder of Geomagic, a 3D digital-reality solution company, reveals the inspiring story of her life. Until age 8, Ping and her intellectual, doting parents lived comfortably in Shanghai. That existence was blown apart by the Cultural Revolution, during which her family was regarded as an enemy of the state. During the 1960s and ’70s, Ping and her younger sister were confined to a camp where she endured years of vicious torture that included being gang-raped when she was 10. Despite receiving no formal education between the ages of 8 and 18, she went on to attend college, but her thesis, on infanticide, landed her in hot water with politicians. Exiled, she arrived in the United States with less than $100 and English so limited she could only say, "hello," "help" and "thank you." Ping’s early years in America were peppered with encounters that ran the gamut from surreal (she was kidnapped at the airport upon her arrival) to quotidian (she studied relentlessly). In 1988, she earned a degree in computer science and joined the team that created NCSA Mosaic, later known as Netscape. She and her husband subsequently founded Geomagic. Ping advises women aspiring to be in a position similar to hers to "[t]hink about moving forward to make personal or social progress, rather than moving higher to gain a superior position."
The book reflects the tone of its author: clear, honest and unassuming.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59184-552-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Current
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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
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
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