When a tank toppled the "Goddess of Democracy" statue in Beijing's Tiananmen Square during the early hours of June 4, 1989, immediate hopes for democratic change in China crumbled in a cloud of dust. This remarkable book is a chronicle in text and pictures of the student-led uprising at Tiananmen and the jackboot repression that brought it to a tragic conclusion.
Compiled by Human Rights in China, a New York City-based organization of Chinese scientists and scholars. Children of the Dragon combines vivid first-person accounts and gritty black-and-white photos from various sources. We are invited to share the exhilaration of the students as the death in April of ex-Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang, who had been stripped of power earlier because of his reformist ideas, sparks a series of antigovernment demonstrations. We are made privy to the moment-by-moment expressions of fear and anguish of people in the square and elsewhere in Beijing as the tanks begin to roll.
Journal-style entries reveal key student leaders to be both courageous and naive. Chai Ling, the diminutive leader of the demonstrators, who later escaped to France, portrays herself as a reluctant firebrand. "I love these kids out there so much," she writes. "But I feel so helpless. How can I change the world? I am just one person." By contrast, Wuer Kaixi, a student union leader now living in the United States, comes across as a grandstander whose bravado is at limes foolhardy. The day of Hu Yaobang's funeral, Wuer grabbed a bullhorn outside the Great Hall of the People and demanded a meeting with Premier Li Peng. But when finally granted an audience with the Premier a month later, Wuer was deliberately discourteous. "I wanted to slight Li Peng," he writes, "so I didn't stand up until he was in front of me."
Little insight is offered into the power struggle within the Communist hierarchy or what prompted party leaders to unleash the People's Liberation Army. Some estimates say as many as a thousand people were slaughtered as the army plowed through crowds en route to the center of the city.
The nearly 3,000 students huddled together for a final stand in Tiananmen ultimately made a calm and dignified retreat. But there was chaos on several of the streets leading to the square. Yu Shuo, a philosophy professor at one of the local universities, describes the anguished and fatal reaction of one young woman after seeing her brother shot. "Crying, she charged toward the soldiers with a cigarette," Yu recalls. "As I watched the girl run forward, I suddenly felt something like hot water splashing on my face. I touched it; I felt brains and blood. I looked around and found the two students who had come with me lying on the ground."
Fang Lizhi, a dissident astrophysicist holed up in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing until he left for England in late June, takes a long view in his postscript to this book. "Remember that in the current climate of terror, it may well be that those who are most terrified are those who have just finished killing their fellow human beings," he writes. "We may be forced to live under a terror today, but we have no fear of tomorrow."
An unspecified part of the proceeds from the sale of Children of the Dragon will be donated to the Fund for Free Expression in China. (Collier, $19.95)
by Dave Barry
Topicwise, the event doesn't rank with the depletion of the ozone layer, the saga of The Pat Sajak Show or the aesthetics of cola cans. But even when the issue is this personal, Barry keeps his uniquely wry, white-bread sense of humor, remembering that every cloud's silver lining can always be devalued, so it's best to get the laughs in early.
This book, not to be confused with any collections of Barry's newspaper columns, is dedicated to "Dan Quayle, who proved to my generation that, frankly, anybody can make it." It is divided into consistently witty reflections on aspects of aging, such as the one where Barry reminds contemporaries that "life expectancy for human beings in the wild is about 35 years. Think about what that means. It means that if you were in the wild, even in the nonsmoking section, by now you'd be Worm Chow. So we can clearly see that going past age 40 is basically an affront to Nature, with Exhibit A being the Gabor sisters."
Other topics include baldness (Barry muses on hairpieces that "make you look as though you have for some reason decided to glue a road-kill to your scalp"), children (he talks of his young son's "pouring PurpleSaurus Rex-flavor Kool-Aid on the patio to form a Liquefied Sugar Theme Park for ants") and sex (Barry notes that the impotent can use an implant involving "valves and switches and remote-control devices, so that you'll be able to get an erection not only when you wish to have sex, but also whenever anybody within a mile of you operates a microwave oven").
While this isn't the triumph of concept and execution he achieved in Dave Barry Slept Here (his satire on history and historians), it is an imaginative, reliably amusing book. Be warned though that near the end there is a startling, serious section on aging parents, in which Barry discusses the suicide of his mother, who remained so distraught months after the death of her husband that she took "a massive overdose of Valium and alcohol." It's impossible to drop something like this into a humor book without its bringing things to a grinding halt, but Barn manages the process relatively gracefully, ending by recalling the smile his mother had the last time he saw her: "I can still see that smile anytime I want. Close my eyes, and there it is. A mom, trying to reassure her boy that everything's going to be okay." (Crown, $16.95)
by Dominick Dunne
When the ambulance attendants emerge from Jules Mendelson's bedroom, his wife, Pauline, and a few loyal servants gather to watch the zippered body bag descend the impressive winding stairway.
"As they rounded the curve by the third of the six Monet paintings of water lilies," Dunne writes, "the shoulder of one of the attendants hit against the gilded frame of the famous picture and knocked it askew. "Be careful!" called out Pauline from below. It was unclear to the attendant whether her concern was for the welfare of the body or the painting of the water lilies."
No matter. Pauline's life has been falling apart since her billionaire mate collapsed of a heart attack on top of his mistress. Pauline, grande dame of Los Angeles society (the kind that doesn't mingle with movie riffraff), will of course never reveal the extent of her humiliation. "Probably no one ever conducted herself so well in a scandal as Pauline Mendelson," writes Dunne.
He must have been humming to himself as he typed away. This novel—broadly based on the Alfred Bloomingdale-Vicki Morgan scandal that rocked Ronald Reagan's kitchen cabinet—fairly sings with social satire, moving at such a jaunty pace that the reader can't help but be swept along, delighting in the characters while guessing at their identities. There's party-loving Rose Clivedon, always called Poor Rose, so falling-down drunk that she's almost always on crutches. There's a man known only as "the former President" who regales everyone with meandering stories.
Casper Stieglitz, a seedy producer with a constantly running nose, sleazed his way out of a prison sentence by agreeing to make a "community service" film. Hortense Madden, the literary critic, moonlights as an ear-piercing singer in a gay pickup joint. Hector Paradiso, the high-lineaged escort, is found one morning riddled with five bullet holes—clearly, Jules Mendelson reports, a suicide.
That death is what starts the real trouble in this meticulously plotted, always amusing novel about a real-life Pretty Woman and her tycoon. Dunne alternates his own dry narrative with tapes of the "inconvenient woman," Flo March. A red-haired waitress whom Jules buys for his very own, March is the real victim here, as well as the true heroine: Feisty, curious, direct, she proves the most endearing of social climbers.
An Inconvenient Woman circles the nouveau riche territory lambasted by Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities. Here, those same fools are far more lovable. Still, the author's point is never lost: In America the rich get away with murder. (Crown, $19.95)
by Sondra Gotlieb
Sondra Gotlieb, wife of Canada's ex-Ambassador to the U.S., Allan Gotlieb, has been gone from Washington for nearly two years, but memories of her linger on.
On March 19, 1986, for instance, while hosting a lavish embassy dinner for Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, she hauled off and slapped her social secretary, Connie Connor, in the face.
The shot in the kisser was billed as the "slap flap" and made delicious headlines everywhere. Sondra Gotlieb's faux pas became part of the Washington lore that still titillates long after the perpetrators have left Powertown on the Potomac. Sondra's slug was right up there with Tidal Basin romps, "killer rabbits," amaretto and cream-strewed bodices, and jocks who advise Supreme Court Justices to "Sandy, baby, loosen up."
Now, for the first time, Gotlieb tells her version of what happened that evening in this name-dropping memoir, which details her seven years on Embassy Row, a bumpy roller-coaster ride that took her to the heights of Washington celebrity and into mortifying notoriety.
This might make a handy guidebook for the uninitiated diplomat or social climber who has spent the last 20 years in Outer Mongolia, but most of her gossipy insights into Washington are out of date. And diplomacy is hardly Gotlieb's strong suit. She takes catty swipes at Nancy Reagan, and her mean-spirited remarks about the media
Aside from taking a whole chapter to explain the slapping incident (she had starved herself the entire day to get into a new red dress, Nancy Reagan had slighted her, and the pressures of entertaining Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney were too much, she says), Gotlieb provides few other tidbits. She offers some firsthand testimony to a Washington rumor that White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan resented National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane's access to President Reagan and "was determined to destroy his credibility" by spreading gossip about McFarlane's having an "adulterous affair." Indeed, it happened at Gotlieb's celebrated table: "I felt that as a hostess I was being used for a sorry political purpose."
A writer and author long before her husband's posting to Washington, where she earned the label "twinkling hostess" from Vanity Fair, Gotlieb seems to want to have it managed to dish it out pretty good in her bimonthly Washington Post columns, but when the slapping incident turned the tables on her, she ran for cover. She blames her downfall on the media and other ambassadors' wives: "Those who were truly nasty were a couple of ambassadors' wives who perhaps had been previously envious of my profile in Washington and some members of the social press who had never met me or barely knew me but who used to call to be asked to our embassy as a guest."
Like Gotlieb and her husband, many of the people she writes about have left Washington or are out of the current social loop. "Washington," as she notes, is not a city. "It is a compact organism. It lives on itself. I will miss it more than I can say." (Double-day, $18.95)
by Mitchell Smith
A college professor gets into his car, legally drunk, drives off and kills a young girl. He is arrested, convicted and sentenced to a maximum security prison. He soon finds himself a citizen of an alien world, living among a citizenry who obey only the harshest rules. In such a world, men like Prof. Charles Bauman are not designed to last.
Then (as if things weren't bad enough) within the prison walls, a killer strikes. One after another, hard-time lifers are stalked and slaughtered. The killer could be anyone—a guard, a con, even a warden—hiding anywhere, primed to attack at any time. Prison officials turn to the one man they feel can bring an end to the carnage.
Guess who that is.
Bauman must now dig deeper into the stone city, searching for murderous motives without any clues. There he confronts the underground economy of prison life working at full throttle—daily doses of gambling, smuggling, payoffs and drugs, all the goods falling under the domain of the ruling prison thugocracy. Stone City is a chilling, brutal novel. The action is intense, the characters real and dangerous, the writing crisp, rich in passion, color and detail. Smith turned a few heads with his first novel, Daydreams. With this book, he gives those heads a few Exorcist twists.
His Stone City is a place without dreams, where a human life is on a par with a discarded pack of smokes and where the symbols of authority—and the men who represent that authority—are meant to be broken and maimed.
Mitchell Smith understands. Stone City does a slow walk through the corridors of injustice and slams the truth home. It is a hard novel to forget. (Simon and Schuster, $19.95)
by Helen Hayes with Katherine Hatch
At age 89, the First Lady of the American Theater has just published her eighth book. If, in her nearly 80-year career as an actress, Hayes has sometimes returned to a role to have yet another go at interpreting it, then here, as an author, she is taking an additional whack at telling the story of her life.
It's a story she told in her 1965 autobiography, A Gift of Joy, and in a volume of memoirs. On Reflection, published in 1968.
This time out, Hayes goes over much of the same territory she covered previously, but she makes admissions late in life that she had trouble facing up to in her previous books. Now, for example, she comes right out and says that her beloved husband, playwright Charles (The Front Page) Mac-Arthur, became a self-destructive alcoholic after their daughter, Mary, died of polio at age 19 in 1949. "Charlie set about killing himself," she writes bluntly. "It took seven years, and it was harrowing to watch. I longed to help, but everything I did proved wrong. Looking back, I feel sure that there was no right thing to do, but at the time I was frustrated, always trying and always doing something wrong."
Less revealing are the many anecdotes she tells about encounters with the famous. President John F. Kennedy borrowed a pen from her, and returned it. Joan Crawford was "not quite rational in her raising of children. You might say she was strict or stern. But cruel is probably the right word."
And of Lillian Gish, a pal for 50 years, she reports, "All her clothes date from 40 years back, but the dresses are still elegant, and she's proud that they still fit."
The titular three acts refer to her years as a child actress, her years with Mac Arthur and her busy and productive three decades since his death. Hayes charmingly admits that she has spent much of the third act copping honorary degrees and awards. "Sometimes when I'm asked what I've been doing since retirement, I'm tempted to answer, 'I accept honors,' " Hayes writes, adding, "Still, if putting in an appearance and being photographed accepting some honor serves to focus attention on an institution or charity, that's fine with me. It is certainly an easy way to do good."
Hayes seems by nature a nice woman, and this is a nice book—which, despite the cynical age we live in, is meant as a compliment. She is not about to deliver the low-down on anyone's sex life or stick the, knife in too deeply, but she does have some good stories to tell, and she tells them agreeably. To ask more of her at 89—onstage she portrayed a bitch once and once only (in the play Mr. Gilhooley) and happily admits she was badly miscast—would be like asking a whittler to start using a buzz saw. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $19.95)
- Contributors:
- David Grogan,
- Ralph Novak,
- Susan Toepfer,
- Garry Clifford,
- Lorenzo Carcaterra,
- Leah Rozen.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
