Review by New York Times Review
HITLER: Ascent 1889-1939, by Volker Ullrich. Translated by Jefferson Chase. (Vintage, $22.) A new biography dispenses with myths of greatness and destiny that circulate about Hitler: In Ullrich's telling, he emerges as a mediocre, unremarkable man who seized on a moment of political rage to rise to power. This book, the first of two planned volumes, ends on the eve of Germany's invasion of Poland, setting off World War II and eventually leading to his downfall. PERFECT LITTLE WORLD, by Kevin Wilson. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Izzy, a teenager pregnant with her teacher's baby, agrees to join a utopian family experiment that resembles a commune. "It's a novel you keep reading for old-fashioned reasons," our reviewer, John Irving, said. "You also keep reading because you want to know what a good family is. Everyone wants to know that." TRUEVINE: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South, by Beth Macy. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $17.99.) George and Willie Muse, two albino African-American brothers, were exhibited in a circus for years during the 20 th century, a situation close to slavery. How they came to join the show is murky, but the core of Macy's reporting focuses on the boys' mother, Harriett, who doggedly sought to bring them home. HISTORY OF WOLVES, by Emily Fridlund. (Grove, $16.) In Fridlund's debut novel, northern Minnesota's austere landscape sets off a grim coming-of-age story. When a young mother and her son arrive in town, Linda, a teenage loner with a fractured home life, is drawn to them. She soon begins babysitting the child, Paul, and finds herself in an ambiguous family dynamic, made worse after his father returns from Hawaii; the moral choices Linda makes haunt her decades later, when she finally tells her story. AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY: A Love Story, by John Kaag. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) A chance encounter leads Kaag, a philosophy professor, to a library full of masterpieces (early editions of works by Kant, signed copies of Thoreau's writings), transforming his professional and personal trajectories. Our reviewer, Mark Greif, praised the memoir as "a spirited lover's quarrel with the individualism and solipsism in our national thought." DO NOT SAY WE HAVE NOTHING, by Madeleine Thien. (Norton, $16.95.) As a child, Marie, the central figure of Thien's novel, and her mother welcome into their home a woman fleeing China after the Tiananmen Square protests. The guest, AnLing, and Marie are linked by their fathers: The men used music to cope with the regime and to remain steadfast to each another during the Cultural Revolution.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 12, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Thien's (Certainty, 2007) new novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, begins in a blur of confusion and death. The narrator called Ma-Li, Li-Ling, or Marie, depending on who's addressing her has lost her beloved father at the age of 10. The circumstances of his death are baffling; all she knows is that, after leaving his family in Vancouver to return to his native China, Jiang Kai has committed suicide for reasons she cannot glean from the barely understood, long-distance conversations her overworked, long-suffering mother has with friends and family back home. Then, just as mysteriously, a young woman named Ai-ming arrives from Beijing at the apartment she and her mother share. Ai-ming's presence has something to do with the fraught student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, and something to do with Li-ling's father, but Li-ling doesn't know much more than that. At first, the child resents the young woman's presence in her small home, but soon enough, Ai-ming wins her over with stories about her family and their close connection to Jiang Kai. And what stories they are! Here, the story opens up from a child's fragmentary understanding of her immediate and painful surroundings to an omniscient and riveting account of an extended family's joys and struggles under Chairman Mao. Along the way, we are introduced to indelible characters with invariably fantastic names Big Mother Knife, Sparrow, and Old West, to name a just few and fully realized, uniformly captivating story arcs. We are treated to engaging philosophical analyses of samizdat, both of words and of notation, and of how the music of Bach, Shostakovich, and other Western composers affects people living in a place where even ghosts are illegal. We also learn how the components of Chinese characters in different dialects enhance the meaning of the words they represent and imbue them with confusion and a kind of magic. Magic, too, is how Thien manages to bring these disparate elements together without making heavy weather of it. The novel is never not immersive, nor anything less than brilliant. All its words are necessary. The book is a bonanza for fans of Richard Powers.--Williamson, Eugenia Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Thien's luminescent third novel (following Dogs at the Perimeter, which won the Frankfurt Book Fair's 2015 LiBeraturpreis), stories, music, and mathematics weave together to tell one family's tale within the unfolding of recent Chinese history. Beginning in 1989 in Hong Kong and Vancouver, this narrative snakes both forward and backward, describing how a pair of sisters survived land reform, re-education at the hands of the Communists, the coming of the Red Guard, the Cultural Revolution, and the protests at Tiananmen square. The story is partially told by the central character, mathematics professor Marie Jiang (Jiang Li-ling), as she discovers her late father's past as a pianist, which was left behind and concealed when he left China for Canada. Thien takes readers into the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where Marie's father studied with composer Sparrow and violinist Zhuli in the midst of the cultural upheaval in the 1960s. Filled with intrigue, shifting loyalties, broken families, and unbroken resistance, this novel is beautifully poetic and as carefully constructed as the Bach sonatas that make frequent appearance in the text. Thien's reach-though epic -does not extend beyond her capacity, resulting in a lovely fugue of a book that meditates on fascism, resistance, and personhood. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Shortlisted for this years Man Booker Prize, Thiens ambitious saga explores the upheavals in Chinese politics from 1949 to the present through several generations of friends, family, and lovers whose intersecting destinies are upturned by the sweep of events.In 1989, at the time of the Tiananmen Square uprising, Jiang Kai, a renowned concert pianist in China before he defected in the '70s, abandons his wife and 10-year-old daughter, Marie, in Vancouver to fly to Hong Kong, where he commits suicide. Soon afterward, Ai-ming, the 19-year-old daughter of Kais former teacher at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, who was killed by authorities during the uprising, flees China and arrives in Vancouver. The girls soon bond reading the Book of Records, a never-seeming-to-end series of notebooks left among Kais possessions and written in the handwriting of Ai-ming's father, Sparrow. The novel follows Marie as she unravels the mystery of her fathers death, his life as a musician in China, and his relationship with Sparrow. She is guided by the notebooks, which narrate a parallel, fairy-tale version of events. But the heart of the story lies with Kai and Sparrow and their attempts to define themselves inside the rapidly shifting political climate that turns against artists and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Fear and pragmatism drive ambitious 17-year-old pianist Kai, who watched his family starve to death as a child in the 1959 famine; joining the Red Guard allows him to pursue his music within limits. Kais teacher/friend/lover Sparrow, a composer of genius whose family is torn apart by party loyalties, wills himself into creative invisibility, choosing survival over art. Sparrows cousin, the violinist Zhuli, whom both men love, refuses to join or hide, and her idealism destroys her. Through these and a host of other sharply rendered characters, Thien (Certainty, 2007) dissects Chinas social and political history while raising universal questions about creativity, loyalty, and identity. Mythic yet realistic, panoramic yet intimate, intellectual yet romanticThien has written a concerto dauntingly complex and deeply haunting. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
