A rich, vibrant collection that pries wide the door to the East, welcoming Western readers inside.
A collection of personal essays and profiles that reveal the wonders and woes of the East.
New Yorker staff writer Hessler (Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, 2010, etc.) bridges the divide between East and West with riveting reportage. In the opening essay, “Wild Flavor,” the author chronicles his visit to a restaurant in southern China, where the waitress casually asked, “Do you want a big rat or a small rat?”—a line that embodies the collection’s interest in celebrating and questioning cultural differences. In the title essay, Hessler and an old Peace Corps buddy take a road trip across northern China, and the well-seasoned travelers find themselves duped at every turn—further evidence of the slow learning curve between cultures. Yet perhaps the theme running throughout most of these essays is the author’s examination of the perils of living in a closed society, in which even the assistant manager of the aforementioned rat restaurant refused to give his name for the book (despite the fact that most of the village shares his name). In “Boomtown Girl,” Hessler best elucidates this fear of oversharing with outsiders by introducing readers to Emily, a Chinese teacher-in-training who bucked all traditional gender roles and set out a future of her own making. While much of the book depicts a country consisting of walls, gates and fences—both literally and metaphorically—Emily’s idealism reveals a new breed of Chinese woman, one whose intrepid spirit serves her well.
A rich, vibrant collection that pries wide the door to the East, welcoming Western readers inside.Pub Date: April 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-220623-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
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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