Book Rec of the Day 1/16/2007

MEMOIRS

“Dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.”—The New York Times

Before there was Amy Tan, there was Maxine Hong Kingston. Her masterpiece is a memoir of growing up Chinese American in California. Kingston relates the raw and unsparing stories her mother recounted throughout her girlhood and fills in the missing pieces with imaginings of her own. The Woman Warrior won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and remains as resonant today as it did when first published.

THE WOMAN WARRIOR, by Maxine Hong Kingston (1976; Vintage, 1989)