An absorbing, multilayered account of the evolution of an enduring culture.
The experiences of three generations of remarkable Tibetan women over the course of a century.
Through the prism of her own life and that of her mother and grandmother, debut author Brauen illuminates a unique culture and its transformation under the repressive Chinese occupation of Tibet. Her story begins with the birth of her grandmother in the 1920s and concludes with the author’s career as an actress and her activities in support of Tibetan liberation. Her grandparents spent their early years as members of a secluded monastic community in Tibet. When their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled the country to escape Chinese repression, her grandparents followed with their two daughters. Although the Brauen expresses great respect for her grandmother's spirituality, she is by no means uncritical of life in old Tibet, which, she writes, “was not a utopian Shangri-La, the blissful paradise on earth that people in the West like to conjure.” The family's journey across the Himalayas was harrowing. When they arrived in India, they faced the brutal circumstances of life in a refugee camp lacking decent sanitary facilities, food and drinking water. Many died, including her father and younger sister. Her mother and grandmother were fortunate to find work with a Swiss-supported charity for Tibetan orphans, even though her mother could only attend school for a few years. When her mother was 17, she met Martin Brauen—the author's Swiss father—who had come to India to study Buddhism. After a prolonged courtship, they married and moved to Switzerland, taking her grandmother with them. It was there that the author and her younger brother were born. In 1986, the family visited Tibet for a joyful reunion with relatives. While recognizing that her grandmother's Tibet is inevitably changing, for her the Dalai Lama remains a cherished example of transcendent Tibetan spiritual values.
An absorbing, multilayered account of the evolution of an enduring culture.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-60013-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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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