Word: memoire
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...said her father, who had visited China. That settled it. In the summer of 1972, as she recounts in a wry, wondering memoir, Red China Blues (Anchor Books; 405 pages; $23.95), she flew to Beijing to join the workers' paradise. A valued propaganda asset, she was enrolled at Beijing University, along with minders assigned to ensure her political purity. To the horror of her fellow students, she clamored to experience the nobility of manual labor, and was eventually allowed to serve at a Beijing tool factory, pretending to make lathes. Her naivete proved to be almost, but not quite, invincible...
...with China but not with the gangsters who ran it, and her account of the Tiananmen Square rebellion and massacre is not just good reporting; it is eloquent, hard-earned history. High levels of both foolishness and good sense, in that order, are necessary for a really fine youthful memoir; on both counts Jan Wong's is a classic...
BOOKS . . . RED CHINA BLUES: In the summer of 1972, as she recounts in a wry, wondering memoir, 'Red China Blues' (Anchor Books; 405 pages; $23.95), 19-year-old Jan Wong left home in the U.S. and flew to Beijing to join the workers' paradise. A valued propaganda asset, she was enrolled at Beijing University along with minders assigned to ensure her political purity. To the horror of her fellow students, she clamored to experience the nobility of manual labor, and eventually was allowed to serve at a Beijing tool factory, pretending to make lathes. Her language skill, anonymous Chinese face...
Helprin's novels are not clearly political and at their most florid are, though much admired, in fact not clear in any direction. Winter's Tale, for instance, is an obscure and very long fantasy about an annoying magical horse. His most recent, Memoir from Antproof Case, is marvelous, brilliantly written bosh about an elderly maniac who fulminates obsessively against coffee. Coffee? Sure...
This anguished memoir by novelist Mary Gordon is a desperate search for her father, a self-created enigma who died when she was seven. Perhaps inevitably, the search fails. The father a seven-year-old knows--her hero, her first Prince Charming--does not really exist. But dying, he is frozen forever in a child's adoring perception. At 10, the author recalls, she began to write her father's biography with the words "My father is the greatest man I have ever known...