Weaving together events she witnessed and those gleaned from her father’s papers, Law-Yone gracefully conveys the dramatic...
The life of a noted Burmese newspaper editor and activist, recounted by his daughter.
Ed Law-Yone, outspoken owner, editor and publisher of Rangoon Nation, the city’s most influential newspaper, left his writings, diaries, notes and letters to his daughter, Wendy (The Road to Wanting, 2011, etc.), hoping that she would use them to tell her family’s story. She felt daunted: “The intricacies of Burmese politics! The byzantine characters and their biblical genealogies! It would take more than a labor of love to disentangle the skeins of Dad’s narrative.” In the 20-plus years since his death in 1980, she published several novels, before the author finally felt ready to investigate her “burdensome legacy.” The result is both an intimate personal memoir and a vivid history of Myanmar, formerly Burma, during decades of roiling upheaval. Ed Law-Yone took over the Nation in 1948, just as Burma won its independence from Great Britain. Sheltered by “the cocoon” of her family, the young Wendy did not see the political chaos around her as a fragile central government was attacked on all sides by groups of insurgents. Political volatility made newsgathering exciting but dangerous; her father, she discovered, kept a loaded gun in his desk. Nevertheless, he enthusiastically embraced his position as a public figure, attending international conferences, embarking on goodwill missions around the world and forging close relationships with men in power. In 1962, however, a military coup overthrew the elected government. Although at first Ed Law-Yone felt protected by his good relationship with the new leader, Gen. Ne Win, soon his role as gadfly and muckraker was quashed—he was arrested and incarcerated for 5 years. After his release, he left the country with his family and joined other Burmese exiles abroad to mount an opposition campaign to the oppressive military government—efforts that ultimately failed.
Weaving together events she witnessed and those gleaned from her father’s papers, Law-Yone gracefully conveys the dramatic story of her youth, her family, and a remarkable man’s life and work.Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-231-16936-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
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
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