Grescoe exuberantly captures the glamour and intrigue of a lost world.
An intrepid journalist in free-wheeling 1930s Shanghai.
At that time, Shanghai was “one of the most cosmopolitan places on the face of the earth,” replete with “gin slings and sing-song girls, rickshaw coolies and Bolshevik spies.” It was a place, writes journalist Grescoe (Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile, 2012, etc.) in this lively biography of a city and some of its colorful inhabitants, “to which the ambitious, the wily, and the desperate could escape to discard old identities and recreate their lives from scratch.” New Yorker writer Emily Hahn arrived there in 1935, intending to stay for two weeks. She fled, along with other expatriates, in 1943. Those eight years were filled with adventure, danger, love, and sex. She soon met the “free-spending playboy” and real estate mogul Sir Victor Sassoon, who had built, among many other edifices, the sumptuous Cathay Hotel, “the best address in the Far East.” He lived in its penthouse, where he entertained the rich, famous, and beautiful, such as the 30-year-old Hahn. Besides accepting gifts from Sir Victor, Hahn supported herself by reporting for a Shanghai newspaper, and soon she began to contribute pieces about exotic China to the New Yorker. Among them were “pen portraits” of a man she called Pan Heh-ven. He was Zau Sinmay, a famous poet—dashing, handsome, “fabulously wealthy”—and her lover. When he balked at being the subject of her “cultural stereotyping,” she was unapologetic: “I use people,” she said. Sinmay introduced her to smoking opium, which accelerated from “a harmless indulgence” to a 12-pipe-per-day addiction before she checked into a hospital for a cure. Hahn’s challenges intensified during the 13-week Battle of Shanghai in 1937, turbulent Chinese politics, and the Japanese occupation. The author deftly follows Hahn’s adventures through this “city of legend.”
Grescoe exuberantly captures the glamour and intrigue of a lost world.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-04971-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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