Overall, though, Lilley doesn’t provide much news, leaving this primarily for US-Asia completists.
A diplomat’s memoirs recount a lifetime’s experiences in China and adjacent lands.
Born in 1928 in Tsingtao, the son of a Standard Oil executive, Lilley had to be repatriated so that he and his China-born siblings could be “Americanized.” By his account, they lived in something of a bubble in China, safe in European compounds, tended to by amahs and houseboys; Lilley clearly feels some nostalgia for that comfortable time, and indeed for the prewar era in general. (Against all current convention, though unapologetically, he insists on rendering Beijing as “Peking,” which lends his words a musty feel.) On returning to the US for college, Lilley was recruited into intelligence work and served in Asia for many years in the CIA, involved in operations in places such as Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War era. Relocated to CIA headquarters, he recalls, he soon found himself missing the field (“I couldn’t help feeling as if the CIA bureaucrats in Langley didn’t know what was going on in the field. And now I was one of those bureaucrats”), but he was rescued when Henry Kissinger started wheels turning “toward projecting a fresh U.S. relationship with China,” in Lilley’s bureaucratic phrase. Though closely identified with the CIA—and known to government officials on all sides as such—Lilley managed to make the jump to the State Department, and eventually to serve as ambassador to South Korea from 1986 to 1989 and ambassador to China from 1989 to 1991. Though on the ground for the Tiananmen Square massacre, Lilley sheds more light on doings back in Washington, which included thwarting Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s ambitions to align the US with Communist China at the expense of Taiwan, even to the extent of “considering the sale of sophisticated arms” to the Communist government.
Overall, though, Lilley doesn’t provide much news, leaving this primarily for US-Asia completists.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58648-136-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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