Moying Li's SNOW FALLING IN SPRING Starred Review in PW

Children's Book Reviews
-- Publishers Weekly, 2/25/2008

Snow Falling in Spring: Coming of Age in China During the Cultural Revolution Moying Li. FSG/Kroupa, $16 (192p) ISBN 978-0-374-39922-1

Recalling 2007's Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party, a fictionalized autobiography by Ying Chang Compestine, this memoir also offers a highly personal look at China's Cultural Revolution. The author is four years old when Mao initiates the Great Leap Forward in 1958, and she describes the transformation of the family's shared, once lovely courtyard as the neighbors follow orders to erect a brick furnace and feed it all their metals in an attempt to produce iron and steel. Everyone, including the child narrator, willingly cooperates, but the instructions are flawed and everything is ruined. The episode prefigures what follows: diligence is repaid with destruction, obedience with chaos, loyalty with treachery. Li effectively builds the climate of fear that accompanies the rise of the Red Guard, while accounts of her headmaster's suicide and the pulping of her father's book collection give a harrowing, closeup view of the persecution. Sketches about her grandparents root the narrative within a broader context of Chinese traditions as well as her own family's values, establishing a basis for Li's later portrayal of the individuals around her who respond to oppression with hope and faith in knowledge and education. B&w family photos reinforce the intimate perspective. Ages 12-up. (Mar.)

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Michael Kodas' HIGH CRIMES Gets a Starred Review in Kirkus

*HIGH CRIMES
The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed
Kodas, Michael

Kirkus, DECEMBER 15, 2007

Publisher:Hyperion
Pages: 368
Price (hardback): $24.95
Publication Date: 2/5/2008 0:00:00
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0273-3
ISBN (hardback): 978-1-4013-0273-3
Category: NONFICTION

A *star is assigned to books of unusual merit, determined by the editors of Kirkus Reviews

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kodas finds avarice, theft and worse on the slopes of Mount Everest during a troubled 2004 expedition.

On assignment for the Hartford Courant, Kodas went with his wife and six others on an Everest expedition that quickly dissolved into acrimony. Problems surfaced with their erratic guide, George Dijmarescu, and other team members even before they left the United States. Eventually, the dissension resulted in charges of theft and physical threats. Kodas also encountered evidence that some team members ignored dying climbers near Everest's peak. The author's cautionary tale paints a grim picture of Everest mountaineering today. Poorly trained climbers, eager for the status of an Everest summit, routinely pay exorbitant fees to guides who inflate their resumes to make a quick buck, then often abandon their clients when they falter in the high-altitude "Death Zone." Increasingly, these wealthy novices are taxing the manpower and resources of able climbers and guides, who are reluctant to leave their own well-paying ascents to rescue them. Meanwhile, Kodas finds the slopes of Everest rampant with crime, from the disappearance of vital equipment to drug use and prostitution. He points to one outfitter who routinely sold substandard oxygen tanks, threatening the lives of climbers who used them. Even steroids have apparently found their way to Everest, as climbers look for that extra boost to get them to the top.

A clear-eyed, riveting narrative.


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Christopher Lane's Shyness Receives Starred Review in Library Journal

From Library Journal, October 15, 2007

*Lane, Christopher. Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. Yale Univ. Oct. 2007. c.272p. photogs. index. ISBN 978-0-300-12446-0. $27.50. PSYCH

Lane (English, Northwestern Univ.; Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England) takes on the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and big pharma, asserting that for self-serving reasons involving control and profit they have colluded to create new psychiatric diagnoses demonizing shyness and demanding treatment by drugs such as Paxil. Having gained access to archival materials from the APA, Lane provides a behind-the-scenes look at the haphazard, unscientific process used to revise The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, along with the equally unscientific procession of drug studies funded by the very pharmaceutical companies that most stand to profit from endorsement of those drugs by the investigating psychiatrists. This superb, iconoclastic cultural study might well be compared to Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, two major works by Michel Foucault exploring the social construction of ideas and institutions. Highly recommended for university and large public libraries.-Lynne F. Maxwell, Villanova Univ. Sch. of Law Lib., PA

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Anthony Lewis' FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE Receives a Starred Review in Kirkus

From KIRKUS (Starred Review), October 15, 2007
Lewis, Anthony
FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE: Tales of the First Amendment

A superb history of the First Amendment and the body of law that has followed it.

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and longtime Supreme Court observer Lewis (Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment, 1991, etc.), now retired from the New York Times, explains in the clearest of language how freedom of expression evolved in this country. Surprisingly, it was only in 1919 that a Supreme Court justice (Oliver Wendell Holmes) wrote that the First Amendment protected speech and publication, and that was in a dissent—not until 1931 did a majority on the Court begin enforcing the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. Drawing examples from many cases, Lewis demonstrates that interpretations of the First Amendment shifted over time as the Supreme Court, and the public, began to recognize that freedom of expression was one of America’s basic values. He considers the ways in which freedom can conflict with such other values as the right to privacy, protection from hate speech, the safeguarding of national security and the right to a fair trial (i.e., one uncompromised by prejudicial press coverage). He also explores the evolution of laws against libel here and in Great Britain and reports on the impact of the landmark 1964 case, New York Times v. Sullivan, which ended the press’s fear of seditious libel actions and promoted the investigative spirit that led to critical coverage of the Vietnam War and Watergate. Anecdotes abound in this lively, lucid history. Among other choice bits, readers will learn which Supreme Court Justice viewing films for their possibly pornographic content took a law clerk with him to tell him what was happening on the big screen.

Timely and important, a work that astonishes and delights as it informs.

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