Author: Ma Bo
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140159428
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
A searing first hand account of China's Cultural Revolution that joins the ranks of great memoirs such as Life and Death in Shanghai, Wild Swans and A Chinese Odyssey First banned in its native land, this earthy, unflinching memoir has become one of the biggest bestsellers in the history of China. In 1968, a fervent young Red Guard joined the army of hotheaded adolescents who trekked to Inner Mongolia to spread the Cultural Revolution. After gaining a reputation as a brutal abuser of the local herd owners and nomads, Ma Bo casually criticized a Party Leader. Denounced as an “active counterrevolutionary” and betrayed by his friends, the idealistic youth was brutally beaten and imprisoned. Charged with passion, never doctrinaire, Blood Red Sunset is a startlingly vivid and personal narrative that opens a window on the psyche of totalitarian excess that no other work of history can provide. This is a tale of ideology and disillusionment, a powerful work of political and literary importance. “A deceptively straightforward story carried forward by deep currents of insight.”—The Washington Post “A genuine, no-holds-barred, unadorned piece of writing…echoing the realities of contemporary China.”—Liu Binyan, The New York Times Book Review
Blood Red Sunset
Author: Ma Bo
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140159428
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
A searing first hand account of China's Cultural Revolution that joins the ranks of great memoirs such as Life and Death in Shanghai, Wild Swans and A Chinese Odyssey First banned in its native land, this earthy, unflinching memoir has become one of the biggest bestsellers in the history of China. In 1968, a fervent young Red Guard joined the army of hotheaded adolescents who trekked to Inner Mongolia to spread the Cultural Revolution. After gaining a reputation as a brutal abuser of the local herd owners and nomads, Ma Bo casually criticized a Party Leader. Denounced as an “active counterrevolutionary” and betrayed by his friends, the idealistic youth was brutally beaten and imprisoned. Charged with passion, never doctrinaire, Blood Red Sunset is a startlingly vivid and personal narrative that opens a window on the psyche of totalitarian excess that no other work of history can provide. This is a tale of ideology and disillusionment, a powerful work of political and literary importance. “A deceptively straightforward story carried forward by deep currents of insight.”—The Washington Post “A genuine, no-holds-barred, unadorned piece of writing…echoing the realities of contemporary China.”—Liu Binyan, The New York Times Book Review
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0140159428
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
A searing first hand account of China's Cultural Revolution that joins the ranks of great memoirs such as Life and Death in Shanghai, Wild Swans and A Chinese Odyssey First banned in its native land, this earthy, unflinching memoir has become one of the biggest bestsellers in the history of China. In 1968, a fervent young Red Guard joined the army of hotheaded adolescents who trekked to Inner Mongolia to spread the Cultural Revolution. After gaining a reputation as a brutal abuser of the local herd owners and nomads, Ma Bo casually criticized a Party Leader. Denounced as an “active counterrevolutionary” and betrayed by his friends, the idealistic youth was brutally beaten and imprisoned. Charged with passion, never doctrinaire, Blood Red Sunset is a startlingly vivid and personal narrative that opens a window on the psyche of totalitarian excess that no other work of history can provide. This is a tale of ideology and disillusionment, a powerful work of political and literary importance. “A deceptively straightforward story carried forward by deep currents of insight.”—The Washington Post “A genuine, no-holds-barred, unadorned piece of writing…echoing the realities of contemporary China.”—Liu Binyan, The New York Times Book Review
Blood Sunset
Author: Jarad Henry
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1741763592
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
When a young runaway is found dead one morning, a syringe hanging out of his arm, no one is terribly shocked. A known junkie, even local detective Rubens McCauley is quick to conclude that Dallas Boyd died of an accidental overdose. But anomalies in the boy's death—and the haunting memory of a childhood friend—continue to nag at McCauley. Unable to shake his unease, he soon digs deeper into the case and finds himself enmeshed in a secret network of pedophiles, child abusers, and underage prostitutes. Forced to look evil in the eye, McCauley must conquer his own demons as he battles to find justice for a young boy he never even met.
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1741763592
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
When a young runaway is found dead one morning, a syringe hanging out of his arm, no one is terribly shocked. A known junkie, even local detective Rubens McCauley is quick to conclude that Dallas Boyd died of an accidental overdose. But anomalies in the boy's death—and the haunting memory of a childhood friend—continue to nag at McCauley. Unable to shake his unease, he soon digs deeper into the case and finds himself enmeshed in a secret network of pedophiles, child abusers, and underage prostitutes. Forced to look evil in the eye, McCauley must conquer his own demons as he battles to find justice for a young boy he never even met.
Mao's Last Revolution
Author: Roderick MACFARQUHAR
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040414
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 742
Book Description
Explains why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and shows his Machiavellian role in masterminding it. This book documents the Hobbesian state that ensued. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing - Mao's wife and leader of the Gang of Four - while Mao often played one against the other.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040414
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 742
Book Description
Explains why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and shows his Machiavellian role in masterminding it. This book documents the Hobbesian state that ensued. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing - Mao's wife and leader of the Gang of Four - while Mao often played one against the other.
Blood Meridian
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307762521
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307762521
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
Fractured Rebellion
Author: Andrew G. Walder
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674268180
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417
Book Description
Fractured Rebellion is the first full-length account of the evolution of China’s Red Guard Movement in Beijing, the nation’s capital, from its beginnings in 1966 to its forcible suppression in 1968. Andrew Walder combines historical narrative with sociological analysis as he explores the radical student movement’s crippling factionalism, devastating social impact, and ultimate failure. Most accounts of the movement have portrayed a struggle among Red Guards as a social conflict that pitted privileged “conservative” students against socially marginalized “radicals” who sought to change an oppressive social and political system. Walder employs newly available documentary evidence and the recent memoirs of former Red Guard leaders and members to demonstrate that on both sides of the bitter conflict were students from comparable socioeconomic backgrounds, who shared similar—largely defensive—motivations. The intensity of the conflict and the depth of the divisions were an expression of authoritarian political structures that continued to exert an irresistible pull on student motives and actions, even in the midst of their rebellion. Walder’s nuanced account challenges the main themes of an entire generation of scholarship about the social conflicts of China’s Cultural Revolution, shedding light on the most tragic and poorly understood period of recent Chinese history.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674268180
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417
Book Description
Fractured Rebellion is the first full-length account of the evolution of China’s Red Guard Movement in Beijing, the nation’s capital, from its beginnings in 1966 to its forcible suppression in 1968. Andrew Walder combines historical narrative with sociological analysis as he explores the radical student movement’s crippling factionalism, devastating social impact, and ultimate failure. Most accounts of the movement have portrayed a struggle among Red Guards as a social conflict that pitted privileged “conservative” students against socially marginalized “radicals” who sought to change an oppressive social and political system. Walder employs newly available documentary evidence and the recent memoirs of former Red Guard leaders and members to demonstrate that on both sides of the bitter conflict were students from comparable socioeconomic backgrounds, who shared similar—largely defensive—motivations. The intensity of the conflict and the depth of the divisions were an expression of authoritarian political structures that continued to exert an irresistible pull on student motives and actions, even in the midst of their rebellion. Walder’s nuanced account challenges the main themes of an entire generation of scholarship about the social conflicts of China’s Cultural Revolution, shedding light on the most tragic and poorly understood period of recent Chinese history.
Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution
Author: Yang Su
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139492462
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
The violence of Mao's China is well known, but its extreme form is not. In 1967 and 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, collective killings were widespread in rural China in the form of public execution. Victims included women, children, and the elderly. This book is the first to systematically document and analyze these atrocities, drawing data from local archives, government documents, and interviews with survivors in two southern provinces. This book extracts from the Chinese case lessons that challenge the prevailing models of genocide and mass killings and contributes to the historiography of the Cultural Revolution, in which scholarship has mainly focused on events in urban areas.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139492462
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
The violence of Mao's China is well known, but its extreme form is not. In 1967 and 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, collective killings were widespread in rural China in the form of public execution. Victims included women, children, and the elderly. This book is the first to systematically document and analyze these atrocities, drawing data from local archives, government documents, and interviews with survivors in two southern provinces. This book extracts from the Chinese case lessons that challenge the prevailing models of genocide and mass killings and contributes to the historiography of the Cultural Revolution, in which scholarship has mainly focused on events in urban areas.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History
Author: Joseph W. Esherick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804767989
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Book Description
Based on a wide variety of unusual and only recently available sources, this book covers the entire Cultural Revolution decade (1966-76) and shows how the Cultural Revolution was experienced by ordinary Chinese at the base of urban and rural society. The contributors emphasize the complex interaction of state and society during this tumultuous period, exploring the way events originating at the center of political power changed people's lives and how, in turn, people's responses took the Cultural Revolution in unplanned and unanticipated directions. This approach offers a more fruitful way to understand the Cultural Revolution and its historical legacies. The book provides a new look at the student Red Guard movements, the effort to identify and cultivate potential "revolutionary" leaders in outlying provinces, stubborn resistance to campaigns to destroy the old culture, and the violence and mass killings in rural China.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804767989
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Book Description
Based on a wide variety of unusual and only recently available sources, this book covers the entire Cultural Revolution decade (1966-76) and shows how the Cultural Revolution was experienced by ordinary Chinese at the base of urban and rural society. The contributors emphasize the complex interaction of state and society during this tumultuous period, exploring the way events originating at the center of political power changed people's lives and how, in turn, people's responses took the Cultural Revolution in unplanned and unanticipated directions. This approach offers a more fruitful way to understand the Cultural Revolution and its historical legacies. The book provides a new look at the student Red Guard movements, the effort to identify and cultivate potential "revolutionary" leaders in outlying provinces, stubborn resistance to campaigns to destroy the old culture, and the violence and mass killings in rural China.
My Old Home
Author: Orville Schell
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0593315820
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 625
Book Description
A uniquely experienced observer of China gives us a sweeping historical novel that takes us on a journey from the rise of Mao Zedong in 1949 to the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, as a father and his son are swept away by a relentless series of devastating events. It’s 1950, and pianist Li Tongshu is one of the few Chinese to have graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Engaged to a Chinese-American violinist who is the daughter of a missionary father and a Shanghai-born mother, Li Tongshu is drawn not just by Mao’s grand promise to “build a new China” but also by the enthusiasm of many other Chinese artists and scientists living abroad, who take hope in Mao’s promise of a rejuvenated China. And so when the recently established Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing offers Li Tongshu a teaching position, he leaves San Francisco and returns home with his new wife. But instead of being allowed to teach, Li Tongshu is plunged into Mao’s manic revolution, which becomes deeply distrustful of his Western education and his American wife. It’s not long before his son, Little Li, also gets caught up in the maelstrom of political and ideological upheaval that ends up not only savaging the Li family but, ultimately, destroying the essential fabric of Chinese society.
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0593315820
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 625
Book Description
A uniquely experienced observer of China gives us a sweeping historical novel that takes us on a journey from the rise of Mao Zedong in 1949 to the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, as a father and his son are swept away by a relentless series of devastating events. It’s 1950, and pianist Li Tongshu is one of the few Chinese to have graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Engaged to a Chinese-American violinist who is the daughter of a missionary father and a Shanghai-born mother, Li Tongshu is drawn not just by Mao’s grand promise to “build a new China” but also by the enthusiasm of many other Chinese artists and scientists living abroad, who take hope in Mao’s promise of a rejuvenated China. And so when the recently established Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing offers Li Tongshu a teaching position, he leaves San Francisco and returns home with his new wife. But instead of being allowed to teach, Li Tongshu is plunged into Mao’s manic revolution, which becomes deeply distrustful of his Western education and his American wife. It’s not long before his son, Little Li, also gets caught up in the maelstrom of political and ideological upheaval that ends up not only savaging the Li family but, ultimately, destroying the essential fabric of Chinese society.
The World Turned Upside Down
Author: Yang Jisheng
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374716919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
Yang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail. As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union’s "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ten-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation’s economy. Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding those years' lasting influence today. The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and Mao-style cult of personality.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374716919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
Yang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail. As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union’s "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ten-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation’s economy. Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding those years' lasting influence today. The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and Mao-style cult of personality.
Blood Red Sunset
Author: Bo Ma
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Book Description
"Every so often a book comes along that captures a place and time so well it overturns the platitudes and excuses, and punctures the rationalizations and the blaming. For many years from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s China was convulsed in a nationwide struggle for the soul of the country, known as the Cultural Revolution. For years after, the blame for the terrible destruction lay with Chairman Mao and the Gang of Four." "The cost in lives lost and ruined is still untotaled, but China has returned to something like normal. In the past several years, the West has begun to come to terms with the stark reality of the Cultural Revolution through books like Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai and films like Farewell, My Concubine. But for the Chinese, the process began with the pseudonymous publication of Ma Bo's extraordinary novel, Blood Red Sunset." "A potent, unbridled memoir of the Cultural Revolution, Blood Red Sunset is one of China's biggest bestsellers in history, selling more than 400,000 copies. It is the story of a young man filled with ideological fervor who wrote a petition - in his own blood - to join the revolution in rural northern China. There he participated in the making of an ecological disaster on the Mongolian grasslands while joining his mates in the often brutal efforts to "re-educate" herd owners and "capitalist Chinese."" "Then, after casually criticizing a Chinese leader, this idealistic youth was denounced as an "active counterrevolutionary," betrayed by his friends, beaten, and imprisoned. His is a story of victimizing and victimization, a reminder of the evil we do to each other and the passionate humanity that survives against all depredations."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Book Description
"Every so often a book comes along that captures a place and time so well it overturns the platitudes and excuses, and punctures the rationalizations and the blaming. For many years from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s China was convulsed in a nationwide struggle for the soul of the country, known as the Cultural Revolution. For years after, the blame for the terrible destruction lay with Chairman Mao and the Gang of Four." "The cost in lives lost and ruined is still untotaled, but China has returned to something like normal. In the past several years, the West has begun to come to terms with the stark reality of the Cultural Revolution through books like Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai and films like Farewell, My Concubine. But for the Chinese, the process began with the pseudonymous publication of Ma Bo's extraordinary novel, Blood Red Sunset." "A potent, unbridled memoir of the Cultural Revolution, Blood Red Sunset is one of China's biggest bestsellers in history, selling more than 400,000 copies. It is the story of a young man filled with ideological fervor who wrote a petition - in his own blood - to join the revolution in rural northern China. There he participated in the making of an ecological disaster on the Mongolian grasslands while joining his mates in the often brutal efforts to "re-educate" herd owners and "capitalist Chinese."" "Then, after casually criticizing a Chinese leader, this idealistic youth was denounced as an "active counterrevolutionary," betrayed by his friends, beaten, and imprisoned. His is a story of victimizing and victimization, a reminder of the evil we do to each other and the passionate humanity that survives against all depredations."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved