A graceful, gently told narrative of contentment and resilience.
A graphic memoir recounts a quiet life amid cultural upheaval.
Pingru, 95, makes his literary debut with a charming memoir illustrated with his own evocative watercolors, chronicling his life in China from 1923 to 2008, the year his beloved wife died. The son of a lawyer, the author grew up in a close-knit family that valued tradition. Throughout the year, his parents, siblings, and assorted relatives gathered to celebrate the seasons and various festivals, pay respects to ancestors and gods, and share special foods. When he was 18, he was accepted into a military academy, eager to join the fight against the Japanese. By the time World War II ended, he had risen to first lieutenant. The most significant event in his life was his marriage to Mao Meitang in 1948. Although the union was arranged by their families, the two had known each other as children and were delighted with the match. Now responsible for a wife, Pingru decided to return to civilian life, though he was unsure about his new path. He learned bookkeeping, tried—and failed—to set up a noodle shop, and settled in Shanghai, where he found two jobs, as a hospital accountant and editor. Everything changed for the worse in 1958, when, caught in the Cultural Revolution, the author was sent to do “Reeducation Through Labor” in a province far from Shanghai. Meitang and their five children were left to eke out a living without him. “The whole family was stigmatized,” he writes. The author does not dwell on the hardship of those 20 years but instead focuses on how he coped: by memorizing sentences in English to occupy his mind during “unskilled and primitive” labor; by learning to play the violin on Sunday, “a rest day”; and by trips home once a year at the Chinese New Year. “For ordinary people like us,” he writes, “life is made up of numbers of small details” that become “treasured memories.”
A graceful, gently told narrative of contentment and resilience.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-87149-2
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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