Author: terryhong

Half the Sky is a remarkable, life-changing book. It should be required reading for all adults (and more mature young adults), but especially for us overprivileged, lucky-solely-by-chance-of-birth citizens of the West. If there is ONE book you read this new year, let it be this one.

Using a Chinese proverb attributed to Mao – “Women hold up half the sky” – Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (the first married couple to win a Pulitzer; WuDunn was the first Asian American to garner a Pulitzer while Kristof has since won a second) seek to rescue women and girls worldwide by “focusing on three particular abuses: sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence, including honor killings and mass rapes; and maternal mortality, which still needlessly claims one woman a minute.”

Most of us are probably at least vaguely aware of the gender inequalities throughout the world. But laid out in this book in black and white, the numbers are beyond staggering: “…more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine ‘gendercide’ in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.”  And lest you think slavery is a thing of the past: ” … far more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year in the early twenty-first century than African slaves were shipped into the slave plantations each year in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.”

What Kristof and WuDunn miraculously accomplish here is to move beyond the mind-numbing numbers and present you with individual stories that will haunt and inspire you. Reading the experiences of actual women who have suffered unbearable atrocities will make you gasp, and hopefully shock you into real action. Balanced with the specific stories of child prostitutes in Cambodia and India, victims of gang-rape in Pakistan and the Congo, abandoned women in too many places left to die from pregnancy complications, are the phenomenal accounts of women who fought back and reclaimed their lives. Additionally, Kristof and WuDunn weave in the successful experiences of individuals and organizations that have empowered and rescued women throughout the world. From a working woman in New York whose $27 a month provides small miracles for a single mother on the other side of the world, to a wealthy donor whose funding changed the future of an entire village, Half the Sky is not about victimization, but about taking concrete steps to create substantial change.

Kristof and WuDunn’s personal mission is clearly stated up front: “We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking womens’ power as economic catalyst.” By book’s end, Kristof and WuDunn offer “Four Steps You Can Take in the Next Ten Minutes” filled with near-instant ways you can make a difference. “This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you’ll just open your heart and join in.” How can you possibly just sit by?

Readers: Adult

Published: 2009

Four years ago (could say five, actually, as we just entered 2010 – already!), University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and noted journalist Stephen Dubner debuted with Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. That first duo-effort quickly became a mega-bestseller and spawned the popular blog of the same name, housed on the New York Times site where Dubner was an editor and writer until 1999 (and still writes a monthly “Freakonomics” column with Levitt for NYT Magazine).

The recent follow-up, SuperFreakonomics, proved a near-instant bestseller … hubby and friends swore I didn’t need to have read the first to enjoy the latest, which definitely proved true. And as I often do things backwards, SuperFreak has absolutely inspired me to read the original Freak one of these days (soon). One small confessional concession, however … no one does BIG-LIFE-concepts-reduced-to-remarkably-digestible-and-downright-entertaining-tidbits better than Malcolm Gladwell, so while SuperFreak was undoubtedly worth the seven-plus hours of iPod commitment (Dubner even sounds a wee bit like Gladwell), I remain a Gladwell-devotee first.

So what makes SuperFreak super? Read even a few chapters and you’ll have some of the best (and impressive) additions to your cocktail conversation arsenal. Let me offer just a few prime examples … family reunions are a major boon for prostitutes in Chicago (stay clear of the windy city when planning your own family’s next get-together!), friends don’t let friends walk home drunk, the seat belt that comes already installed in your car works just as well as that complicated bulky thing you invested in to protect your precious small children, getting doctors to just wash their hands is one of the biggest challenges in hospitals (take note for when you might land in one next!), and if you teach monkeys the concept of money, they’ll be buying a lot more than treats … when it comes to prostitution, our nearest animal relatives show disturbing similarities to our (very) flawed human race!

Levitt and Dubner expertly combine careful research by countless experts and their convincingly relevant statistics to create a real-life-economics-for-dummies treatise perfect for today’s attention-deficit intellectuals looking for knowledgeable shortcuts. They’ve done all the work for you … now all you have to do is just read (or even easier, just listen).

Readers: Adult

Published: 2009

One Halloween night when Anne Greves is 16, she goes with older friends to a jazz club and falls in love for the first time in her young life. Serey is an older man, already in his 20s, a musician, who has already lived too hard a young life. He is in Canada to further his studies in mathematics from his native Cambodia, the only member of his family to escape the genocide at hands of the vicious Khmer Rouge. Initially, love is enough for Anne and Serey, and they are caught up only in each other. Anne leaves her widowed father who shuns her new lover, admonishing her for being so young and foolish.

But the ghosts of his family call Serey home, and he must return to find out what has happened to them. Anne is devastated, growing more despondent when she does not hear from him. Eleven years later, Anne travels to Phnom Penh, convinced that she saw Serey in a television report. Now fluent in Khmer, Anne meets a local driver, Mau, who eventually, remarkably leads her to Serey. Their reunion is overwhelming with both intense loss and joy. But it cannot last and Serey becomes one of the may millions of “disappeared.” But in her utter grief – how ironically, tragically fitting her name is Greves – Anne cannot, will not ever let Serey go.

Through the tragic love story of two lost souls, Kim Echlin adds an urgent human dimension to the unbearable numbers of history’s inhumanity. The Cambodian genocide of the late 1970s which claimed some two million lives – collateral damage is far too much about the innocent victims – looms large in Echlin’s searing book that attempts to give names and faces to the far too many that disappeared, and the few who tried to survive with some semblance of humanity intact.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2010

Samuel Polk is 16, athletic, has good friends, and lives in a small southern town in Georgia. He tells everyone he’s gotten over his mother’s sudden death a year ago. While his relationship with his father isn’t the closest, they’ve managed to establish a daily routine that works for them for now, surviving without their missing link. He misses his brother almost as much as his mother, or maybe even more because his brother’s not dead, just away at college, but the distance is more than physical.

Working on a video project for a high school class, Samuel decides to go check out baby triplets in the next town over … but not just any triplets, but mutant triplets apparently conceived immaculately living a sequestered life with their single mother. Samuel’s first reaction is so shocking, he can’t do more than vomit, then flee. But he can’t seem to get the image of the misshapen little figures out of his mind and he returns to visit them once more. Their mother is justly horrified with Samuel’s initial reaction and wants nothing to do with making her children a freak show – to her they are a precious gift from God.

In the disturbing home, Samuel encounters the triplets’ much older brother, who has evil secrets of his own … and forces Samuel to face the latent violence in his own self. Samuel’s nightmares become reality and he becomes convinced that his own salvation depends on somehow saving the triplets from certain destruction.

I have to admit that I had little idea of how Korean American Sang Pak’s debut novel would unfold from the back cover description, and was chillingly thrilled it turned out to be a fast-moving surprise. Part gothic mystery, part gruesome horror, part coming-of-age tale of self-discovery, and all shocking finale, Pak’s novel makes for a great airplane read … guarantee you’ll forget for at least a few hours that you’re stuck in that middle seat!

Readers: Adult

Published: 2009

Cynthia Kadohata, who won the top children’s book honor, the Newbery Medal, in 2005 for her debut middle-grade title, Kira-Kira, returns with a heartbreaking story about a young Vietnamese boy and his special relationship with the elephant in his charge.

High in the central highlands of war-torn Vietnam, Y’Tin Eban wants nothing more in life than to train elephants. He has a special gift with the gentle giants, but is most attached to Lady who provides him with his greatest joys. Y’Tin’s family is part of the peaceful indigenous tribe, the Dega, but even they cannot escape the tragedies of civil war.

Y’Tin’s father works with the American Special Forces, hoping to keep their village safe from the North Vietnamese Army. But war is unpredictable, and when the Americans abandon the country in 1975, the village is attacked and the survivors forced to flee. Y’Tin is initially captured by marauding North Vietnamese soldiers who are no more than boys themselves, but somehow manages to escape. He is forced to confront his father’s involvement with the Americans, and his life-long friendships that seem to be falling apart. He must look deep into his heart and decide what is best for his Lady, who is about to bring a new life into the world.

As his life changes so rapidly, young Y’Tin must face “a million shades of grey” between loyalty and betrayal, right and wrong, and even life and death. Kadohata – whose young son is originally from Vietnam – writes a stirring, memorable story about the unconditional love between a boy and his (larger-than-life) pet, and the tragic destruction of innocent lives during times of inexplicable war. Her informative ”Author’s Note” at title’s end offers historical context about the indigenous tribes of the Vietnamese highlands, and the subsequent immigration of some of those refugees to the U.S., many settling in North Carolina.

By the way, pull out a hankie or two … you’re going to need it.

Readers: Middle Grade

Published: 2010