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    The Beauty of Humanity Movement
    The Beauty of Humanity Movement
    The Beauty of Humanity Movement
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Beauty of Humanity Movement

    Written by Camilla Gibb

    Narrated by Jennifer Ikeda

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Camilla Gibb reached international best-seller status with novels that garner immense critical acclaim for their stunning insights into the human condition. In The Beauty of Humanity Movement, three people's lives in modern Vietnam turn on the whims of fate-even as each strives for a finer reality. Freshly returned from the United States, Maggie is an art curator in search of her father. Old Man Hung, a soup seller, may hold the secret that could change Maggie's destiny. And Tu' is a tour guide who will have a stunning effect on them both.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateApr 22, 2011
    ISBN9781449867645
    The Beauty of Humanity Movement

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    Reviews for The Beauty of Humanity Movement

    4/5

    11 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I loved this book. It took a bit to get into it, but once I did, I couldn't put it down. The Beauty of the Humanity movement is a great story, about some the more complex consequences of the Vietnam war. The book is well written, and I will pass it on!
    • 4/5
      I very much enjoyed "The Beauty of Humanity Movement." It's a lovely story that features " Old Man Hung" who tells us the story of Vietnam from modern times to back before the Second world war and before. Hung tells us the story through events in his life. One of the lovely aspects of the story is the sense of respect and love of family or adopted family in Old Man Hung's case. On one level it's a beautiful story of love and respect for the old and the new in Vietnam. I came away from reading the book with an entirely new perspective on Vietnam and much more positive one than I had previously held. One of the characters, Maggie, is a young woman who fled Vietnam as young child with her mother to the US, and returns to Vietnam to find her roots. We are able to "see" and understand Vietnam from both a very modern perspective as well as historical Vietnam.I gained a large amount of knowledge about Vietnam and often found myself often referring to Wikipedia to understand some of the long history of Vietnam. One thing that I took away from this novel -which was written by a social anthropologist - was that the idea that the US war had much of an impact on Vietnam is mainly a western construct. That was fascinating to me , because as a westerner , most of what I have known about Vietnam has been from Western perspective. I learned that Vietnam has been fighting many larger battles throughout all of it's history - with China, the Occupation of France for some hundreds of year, the attack of the Japanese into Vietnam etc. The book certainly does not focus on any battles, but it just refers to various parts of history in Vietnam. [The Beauty of Humanity ] is first and foremost a lovely story but I really took away a new understanding of Vietnam and that mattered to me. I will definitely read Camilla Gibb's other book, The Sweetness in the Belly, which takes place in Ethiopia. This quote from the The Beauty of Humanity really stood out to me " No more art or artists," he says. " Just American's and their obsession with the war.""It runs very deep in the American psyche," says Maggie. If the Vietnamese were so obsessed , if they did not didn't get over the war and allowed themselves to lie down and be haunted or just lay down like dogs, where would they be today? In the South they'd be speaking Khmer; in the North they'd be speaking Mandarin. The Vietnamese would yet another ethnic minority being kicked about like a football by the big boots in Beijing." My only complaint with the story is that it starts out very slowly and it sometimes moved more slowly than I felt was needed, though I enjoy reading slow , thought provoking books. 3.7 stars. Well worth the read if you want a different perspective on Vietnam and a beautifully told story.
    • 4/5
      This is a truly beautiful and uplifting book about the devastating consequences of war and the resilience of mankind.
    • 4/5
      Asia has long fascinated me, Vietnam in particular. I can't really account for the appeal other than acknowledging that there is one. And modern Vietnam, the Vietnam to emerge from the devastation of the war and then the restrictive and punitive Communist measures, intrigues me most of all. It is this Vietnam then, that Gibb evokes in her newest novel, a novel about art and truth and conviction. Opening with itinerent pho maker Old Man Hung finding the latest in a never-ending series of places to sell his fragrant broth, the reader is introduced to this man who had once been the center around whom an arts movement once flourished and the two men amongst his regulars, father Binh and son Tu, who have become the closest thing he has to a family. Into Hung's regular existence comes art curator Maggie Ly, a Viet Kieu, born in Vietnam but raised overseas (America in Maggie's case). Maggie is searching for any sign of her father's past but she has only hit dead ends until she finds Old Man Hung and a faint glimmer of hope. Maggie's presence and her inquiry about her father, an artist who escaped a reeducation camp with his hands permanently crippled, jolts Hung back into his past. Hung's pho shop had, in the years immediately following the war, been a meeting place, an anchor, for the Beauty of Humanity Movement group of artists who daringly questioned the path the country was taking. Dao, Binh's father and Tu's grandfather, had been at the forefront of the movement, insisting on using artwork and poetry revolutionarily. But the group went too far and they were betrayed, Hung lost his shop, and Binh lost his father. With the opening up of Vietnam, Maggie has come in hopes of finding a trace of her father, most likely in this group of determined artists and poets who stood by their convictions even in the face of harassment and arrest. The narrative is triple-stranded, focused on Hung's memories of the past and of all those who died, Maggie's history and search for proof of her father's life before her, and Tu's sanitized or narrowly focused history of Vietnam offered in the course of his job as a tour guide for Westerners. All three of these threads are important to the tale although Hung's have perhaps the most weight as they tie everything together; the past informs the future. The writing is patient, unfolding slowly, revealing the smallest of historical information carefully and almost secretively. Descriptions are vivid and full although occasionally a bit much. Like Hung's pho, Gibb's novel is simple, well-balanced, and satisfying as well as saving room for the unexpected to pull all the flavors together into a seamless whole. Book clubs looking for a very different perspective on the Vietnam War and its long-term effect on the Vietnamese people will find much to discuss and enjoy here.
    • 3/5
      Engrossing book, finished it in a week. The title refers to a movement in Vietnam before the communists took over from the French. A lot of tragedy also in the book. I was struct by the fact that no matter where communism takes over it follows the same path, suppression of freedom and lots of killing of innocent people, whether in Russia, Vietnam, Cuba or North Korea, the template is the same.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this modern-day story that allows the reader to look back on Vietnam and its history. The realities of the effects of the war on its citizens is not sugar-coated or glossed over, but because it is done as memories, I found it less gut-wrenching to read, while still aware of the horror of it. It was also enjoyable to read how the country has this very real juxtaposition of old world and 21st century technology, of poverty and excess, in its everyday life.

      The characters are all likable and interesting; the writing is good, too. It moves along but still creates strong pictures, scenes, and feelings. A good read.
    • 5/5
      I must confess that Camilla Gibb is one of my favourite Canadian authors. I first fell in love with her Petty Details of So-and-So's Life and continued my love affair with Sweetness in the Belly. Mouthing the Words, although a difficult read, was told with authenticity and tenderness.Being a traveller at heart, any novel set in Asia immediately draws my eye so I expected to fall in love with this novel. And I did.The Beauty of Humanity Movement is about daring to express original thoughts at a time when those thoughts are not welcome. It is about fighting to speak the truth and the cost that such action entails. Maggie is an art specialist who was raised in America but returns to Vietnam in order to find her father who was torn from her at a very young age. During her quest, she not only uncovers information about her father and his contemporaries but also immerses herself in this hitherto unfamiliar culture. Gibb moves not only from one art form to another, from one culture to another, from past to present but also through the generations. There is beauty in this movement and despite the temptation to believe there is little beauty in humanity, Gibb brings us around to a deeper understanding of our place in the world, of our belonging to an international community and of our obligations to civilization.
    • 3/5
      Camilla Gibb's The Beauty of Humanity Movement, a novel of contemporary Vietnam, skillfully mingles past and present into an arresting and effective narrative. Hung is an itinerant pho seller who once had his own restaurant, until it was confiscated by the communists. More than fifty years later he still trundles a cart around Hanoi, feeding a faithful corps of customers who depend upon his magical recipe to start their day. In the 1950s Hung's restaurant was a haven for a collection of artists and writers who refused to conform to the communist ideology of the time, who insisted on expressing themselves despite the dangers and published their work in defiance of a government that had branded them as counter-revolutionaries. After a brief period of productivity the group was broken up by the government; some were killed and others were sent to re-education camps. All these years later Hung remains close to the family of the group’s ringleader, a revered poet named Dao, to whom he keeps a shrine in the shack where he lives beside a polluted lake. Dao’s son Binh and grandson Tu keep watch over the old man. Enter Maggie, the daughter of the artist Ly Van Hai—one of the group from Hung’s restaurant—who managed to get his wife and daughter out of Saigon as it was being overrun by communist forces in 1975, but who in the end did not survive. Maggie, an art curator, grew up in the US, and is thoroughly American in her habits and attitudes. The main thread of Gibb’s story follows Maggie’s efforts to track down some remnant of her father’s life, a search that brings her into contact with Hung, Tu, and Binh. The novel provides a convincing and vivid portrait of what life in Vietnam is like today, but does not shy away from the horrors and hardships of a past that has seen more than its share of war and brutality. Crucial to the novel’s success is Gibb’s understanding of Vietnamese history, food and culture, which enables her to sprinkle the text with convincing and illuminating detail of a sort that brings this complex and highly spiritual country and its people to life on the page. The novel’s weakness is a soft ending, which is content to provide everyone with exactly what his or her heart desires. But The Beauty of Humanity Movement is certainly worth reading and will be of interest to anyone who finds the exotic otherness of Vietnam alluring, a country that has not yet resolved the many contradictions at its core.