Multilayered, provocative and highly accessible, this will appeal to Chan fans, scholars and general readers.
China-born poet and critic Huang (English/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara/Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics, 2008, etc.) recounts the making of an American folk hero.
Debuting as a minor character in novelist Earl Derr Biggers’ The House Without a Key (1925), Charlie Chan attained enormous popularity through six novels and nearly 50 films, as well as radio dramas and a comic strip, creating what the author calls a “tortured legacy in American culture, a legacy that at once endears and offends millions.” By the late ’40s, the genial, aphorism-spouting detective was firmly established as a funny, beloved figure, or as a Yellow Uncle Tom, depending on one’s point of view. In this original, deeply personal account, Huang illuminates every conceivable aspect of Chan and his place in American culture. His vibrant narrative tells the stories of Biggers, a newspaperman turned novelist, who created Chan as an alternative to Sax Rohmer’s villainous character Fu Manchu; Chang Apana, a legendary, crime-busting Chinese cop in Honolulu who wore a Panama hat, carried a bullwhip and became the real-life basis for Chan; and the fictional Chan, who entered American popular culture just as nativists succeeded in pushing through anti-Chinese immigrant legislation. Chan was played in hit movies by Swedish actor Warner Oland and others and has been vehemently dismissed in recent years as nothing more than a racial stereotype by author and playwright Frank Chin and other prominent Asian Americans. Huang takes a balanced view. Chan is a racist stereotype, he writes, but he is also a folk hero, exemplifying the “cultural miscegenation” that critic Stanley Crouch calls “the catalyst of the American experience.” The author makes a convincing case for Chan’s place in film history not as an Uncle Tom but rather as one in a line of wise detectives with eccentricities, including Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. An appendix offers more than 50 “Charlie Chanisms.”
Multilayered, provocative and highly accessible, this will appeal to Chan fans, scholars and general readers.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06962-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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
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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