A thoughtful, astute narrative that helps Western readers understand the rise of the new China from the ashes of terror.
A powerful memoir of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath by pioneering investment banker Lan Yan.
The author opens with a scene in which eight security officers surround her grandfather. “I am crying,” she recounts, “because I am not used to all this yelling, all these staircase stampedes, all this banging on doors.” With this dramatic opening, the author describes the arrest of her grandfather in the early years of the Cultural Revolution. It did him no good to insist on seeing an arrest warrant, because there was none: Under the revolution’s explosion of seething populism, the country was no longer a state ruled by law. Soon Lan Yan and her family were also suspect, tarred by association with a supposed counterrevolutionary who had long been a devoted associate of Mao Zedong. Mao had had disagreements with the Soviet Union a decade earlier over his Hundred Flowers liberalization campaign, which the Soviets feared would open the government to ideological questioning; said one Soviet official, “This is exactly the kind of incitement to bourgeois thinking that we have seen in Hungary!” It didn’t help the author’s case that it was her father who translated the Soviet official’s words into Chinese. After her grandfather was taken away, her father was accused of being a Russian spy. The author, herself interned, graduated from high school but was denied permission to teach, as she had wanted to do: “Their argument was that, since I came from a ‘problematic’ (i.e., counterrevolutionary) family, they believed that I would have to be reeducated, and that in any case I was not fit to educate others.” Allied with Deng Xiaoping, Lan Yan instead emerged as a rising figure in the new era of state capitalism, becoming a partner in a French international law firm that helped open the Chinese market and then heading a bank with a predominantly female leadership, defying the fact that “the world of banking is, just like the legal world, still very misogynistic.”
A thoughtful, astute narrative that helps Western readers understand the rise of the new China from the ashes of terror.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-289981-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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