No comments about Wall Street and Its Mystery Men (Secrets of the Great Investors).

No comments about Daze on the Plains Audiocassette: A New Yorker on the Level.

5 comments about The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found.

1. I so wanted to like this book. The blurb and cover promise a paean to craftsmanship--to the honest pleasures of creative manual labor, carefully and lovingly done. Perhaps the most misleading blurb reads: "The housebuilding section contains some of the best writing about work in American literature."
   
   First of all, the "housebuilding section" takes up the last 62 pages of this 265-page book, so praising that section is faint praise for the book as a whole. Second of all: "some of the best writing about work in American literature"--is this reviewer kidding? (Has he ever read any American literature?)
   
   Look, Snyder's a capable stylist (though nothing more). But he's also a dismal excuse for a human being. This is a problem for a memoirist: it's hard to like a memoir by an unlikable person.
   
   I tolerated Snyder's selfish, self-pitying ways ("Poor me, I lost my job") in the early part of the book because he mocks himself enough that I gave him the benefit of the doubt. "Hmm," I thought, "he seems like a complete asshat, but he also seems to know this--so surely he has a transformative epiphany later." In fact, Snyder has adopted a pose of self-mockery, but it's only a pose. By the book's end, he's the same selfish twit he was at the beginning, only he's a handyman and author rather than an English professor.
   
   Consider: In September 1993, Snyder had been unemployed for about four months, living off of his family's savings in a rented house in Maine. He had been told almost 18 months earlier (in March 1992) that the 1992-1993 school year would be his last as an English professor at Colgate. He applied for lots of teaching jobs but struck out. He didn't seriously try to find any other work and, after he finished teaching at Colgate in the spring of 1993, he spent most of his time feeling sorry for himself, lying to his family, drinking too much, and generally being useless.
   
   His wife, meanwhile, was keeping the family together and taking care of their four young children. By September, the family had $1700 in the bank, and Snyder still had no prospects (he spent his days--I kid you not--stealing golf balls with his son). Snyder had also been volunteering at a homeless shelter, reading Raymond Carver stories aloud to the men there. One of the residents had recently left his cancer-ridden wife to wander the streets depressed. Snyder "became obsessed" with this man and his family and learned "that the father had hit bottom when he was unable to take his family to Disney World. It was the only thing his wife asked for, a family trip to Disney World before she no longer had the strength for such a journey." [188]
   
   So Snyder, obsessed with this other family and heedless of his own, emptied his checking account and gave the money to a priest to give to the abandoned cancer-ridden wife so she could go to Disney World. And Snyder did this without saying a word to his wife.
   
   This is pretty bad: Snyder, to give himself a momentary self-congratulatory high, impoverishes his family behind the back of his wife (the only grown-up in the marriage). But it gets better.
   
   Snyder gets a job as a groundskeeper. Meanwhile, Snyder's wife, like any sensible person whose husband has thrown away the family's money on some masturbatory fantasy, applies for food stamps. The first time his wife goes shopping with them, something humiliating apparently happens, because their youngest daughter, Erin--who accompanied her mother to the store--has a weeping fit when they get home and tells Snyder, "You made us use those stupid tickets." [196]
   
   Snyder doesn't like the cheap groceries his wife brought back. So he invites his oldest daughter, Nell, to go shopping for "real food" so they can "throw a party or something." [196] (Because that's what you should do when your sensible wife got food stamps after you gave away your family's money without consulting her.) At the store, he buys shrimp. He gets a dirty look from a well-dressed couple behind him and, turning to the couple, says to Nell: "You know why this man is groaning? If we were buying boxes of macaroni and cheese with our food stamps it would be all right with him, but we're buying shrimp, and he's groaning about it because that's the kind of food he eats." [197] Nell must have appreciated this.
   
   Later that night, Snyder makes up a bedtime story for his kids. The story is about a poor woman, and at the end of the story, Erin (the daughter who cried about the food stamps) says, "So she had to use those food tickets then?" Snyder is dumbfounded ("I couldn't believe that she was still angry about this") but his wife steps in and says, "Yes. She used them and she held her head up anyway because she was doing the best that she could and she respected herself." [199]
   
   Good message, mom. But you can count on Snyder to undermine it. As soon as he gets his construction job, he comes home and conspicuously burns the family's food stamps in the fireplace, making sure that Erin is watching. Erin asks who bought them the food stamps. Snyder: "I told her that people who had jobs bought them. She wanted to know why. 'Because they're earning money, and it's only fair that they should help people who aren't earning money.'. . . I continued on awhile longer, trying to impress upon my daughter that the notion of a lucky person helping an unlucky person was the only thing that held civilization together." [206]
   
   Say what? Snyder burns the food stamps in front of his daughter to prove that he's a man, thereby validating his daughter's shame about relying on them (if they're not shameful, why burn them?) and undermining his wife's sensible and self-respecting message (people who use food stamps are doing the best they can and should respect themselves), and then Snyder tries to convince her that charity makes the world go round? Which message should Erin believe, the one Snyder sends by his actions or the one he puts into words?
   
   This last scene, and Snyder's narration of it, captures what I hate about this book: by his actions, Snyder shows us that he's selfish and self-absorbed; by his words, Snyder tries to persuade us that he's virtuous and self-aware. The worst part, of course, is that he has fooled himself (and, apparently, a lot of readers, most of whom review this book very highly).
   
   This book is available used for about a penny. It's not worth it.



2. This is about the hard-hitting reality of losing a job you love and not ever being able to get back into the field ever again no matter how hard you try. Overall the writing was well-done and it was interesting, but I was hoping to feel more enlightened about how to reconcile this type of life experience. However, the writer conveys the sense that part of his identity was lost with the teaching job, and though he did learn the benefits of a different kind of life, he still seemed broken in some ways at the end of the story. I was hoping the ending would be more uplifting. But overall, good writing and very interesting.



3. I just read this book while still mired in a job search going on three years. The emotional tailspin the author displays is heart-wrenching and familiar; the tone of the first 200 pages felt like reading my own journals. I did not identify with the author's deceptions and strange behaviors, however, such as lying to his wife or to an insurance company, or considering selling a new baby. But everyone has their own threshold for going haywire, and the point of this book is that Don Snyder got through it and learned something about life, work, and family.
   
   THE CLIFF WALK, beyond the author's personal journey, raises excellent questions about the "American Dream" and what it means in our modern age. It also looks at the meaning of work, and how we draw self-esteem -- even identity -- from what we do for pay. This is a courageous book, even if you don't always approve of how the author responds to his plight, and it offers a strong dose of perspective on what really matters.



4. This is the ultimate victory story...with a twist. Unlike most autobiographical profiles, this one doesn't stand tall and tell you how great it is to be great. The thing is, it doesn't wrap itself up neatly either; the ending doesn't suddenly justify everything that has happened along the way. It's a formula all it's own, one that carries you up and down through the vulnerable channels this man had to endure.
   What's so refreshing about this book is kind of what I liked about the movie "Fargo"--the realization that a good story is as much the cumulitive value of the bits and pieces as it is the linear value--of this happening, then this, then this. Moments like his talking to a stranger while chipping golf balls capture the true feeling, the mixed combination of killing time with his genuine fear of being unemployed for even one more day. It's a strange loneliness that we all feel from time to time, even when we're not truly alone. Again, most writers need to have scaled great mountains before they'll write a story where they hang themselves out like this. Don Snyder makes an exception. In today's world, most nonfiction books succeed based on what they emphasize, leave in, or leave out. Snyder tells it all--even the bits that aren't exactly flattering.
   And in the end, he shows his true grit: not with eagles or birdies, but simply by making the pars he's supposed to make. And don't let my analogies fool you: it's not about golf. It's just your typical combination of fear and pride and confusion that somehow lead us to where we are today. And it's that kind of simplicity that makes a book like this stand the test of time, whether it be now or 50 years down the road.



5. My husband and I both read this book a few years ago and agreed that it was one of the most profound memoirs we'd ever read. Snyder was born to write and we are blessed to have his thoughts recorded for posterity.

No comments about Winston Churchill.

No comments about Pilgrimage.

5 comments about Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey.

1. This is the best political memoir I have ever read. The author is an extremely skilled writer and presents an account of his journey from a far left leader to a conservative activist in a compelling way. It feels strange to say this about a non-fiction political book, but I had a hard time putting it down. This memoir was well organized and flowed very easily. The author gives an especially personal expose of the criminality of the Black Panther Party. This book should be must reading for students entering college to inoculate them against the left-wing indoctrination by their professors. It explains so much about the failings of the left.



2. I read this book over 7 years ago and found it to be the foremost manual on how the 1960's generation completely destroyed this country. We are suffering from their antics today as some of the most immoral and unethical people in the Federal, State and Local governments are children of the 1960's. David Horowitz has to be the left's most hated person as he grew up in an "intellectual" communist/socialist family and then did a 180 turn around. His parents supported Stalin whole-heartedly only to be destroyed when the world found out that Stalin had murdered over 30 million Soviets in the Russian gulags. As a young man Horowitz was in the middle of the riots in Berkeley and Columbia Universities. Horowitz goes through a radical change in his thinking due to the death of a good friend whom he recommended for a job with the Black Panther Party in Oakland. His radical change involves not only leaving the left, but realizing the damage that it has inflicted on the very fabric of this country's fundamental morals and ethics.
   
   The reason I write this review seven long years after reading Radical Son is to congratulate David on his bravery and honesty in exposing the hate of the left. On September 11, 2008, The New York Times (lefty newspaper) printed a story about a man named Morton Sobell. Morton Sobell was convicted in 1951 along with Julus and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges. The Rosenbergs were executed and became the martyrs of the left for years and years. Martin Sobell spent 30 years in prison denying vehmently that he along with the Rosenbergs was innocent. In the article published in the New York Times on September 11, 2008, Martin Sobell, now 91 years old, admitted that he along with Julus Rosenberg was guilty of spying for the Soviet Union. In the article, Robert Meeropol, son of Julus and Ethel Rosenberg states that if Morty said it then it must be true. Thank you David for staying with it - you knew all along that Joe McCarthy was right.



3. I had always been disappointed by the memoirs of political figures on the left because of their inability to reflect on themselves---to even attempt to understand why they had seen the world the way they had, and how their visions had affected who they were. I did not think this omission accidental. If radicalism was a displacement of personal grievance, it wasn't surprising that radicals could not confront their interior lives. "The Left, the author eventually realized, "lived by its radical myths, which were crucial to its sense of moral superiority, of being chosen as humanity's moral vanguard." "When I looked into myself, I saw how integral my radical views were to my sense of myself and the world around me." The above words, bereft of quotes, are not mine, incidentally, but the author's too, explaining why he wrote "Radical Son": "The collapse of this faith had been inseparable from the collapse of the life I had lived. I could not conceive of an autobiographical work that would not attempt to plumb this connection." Mr. Horowitz was the child of Communists, was inculcated into this faith, as it were. The real bounties his parents had achieved in America, the author states, hardly impressed them. "Success like theirs was so common that they took it for granted. What my family longed for," rather, he writes herein, "was an impossible fantasy: that mankind would be released from history, which included individual success and failure; their ambition was that poverty and inequality would disappear from the earth. To realize this fantasy they dedicated themselves to the Communist cause."
   
   Mr. Horowitz's parents were Jewish, and like Marx and Spinoza were "of Judaism but not in it" and whose outsider status had led to their revolutionary views."
   
   It's interesting moreover how many Marxist sympathizers were Jewish as well. It was believed by such folk that "Socialism would `solve' the Jewish question by eliminating Judaism, along with other ethnic and national identities." "What we had to ask ourselves,' Horowitz once explained at a public forum, "was whether Marx wasn't a self-hating Jew, and whether socialism was anything more than a wish to be included."
   
   "Fusion and unity---this was the cry of my father's Communist heart, writes the author herein, "His unquenchable longing to belong."
   
   For many years Mr. Horowitz was also a Communist, becoming eventually a prominent writer and figure of the 1960s Left, himself focusing as he did "on the issues of equality and freedom that once inspired [him] as a radical." Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956 shook many Communists, but Horowitz states that, at the time, "I was not sure what to make of it all. Monstrous crimes had been committed, and much else had gone terribly wrong. But did this mean it was necessary to abandon socialism? I was not ready for that," he writes herein. "The socialist vision provided the only way I knew of looking at the world that would distinguish right from wrong that gave hope for a better future. Socialism was the desire for justice. I did not see how I could give that up."
   
   So it wasn't surprising when he took another leap of faith when a "New Left" began forming out of the ashes of the old; participants like Horowitz, doing so, "out of the conviction that the original passion could be born again, and that we could create a new socialist vision free from the taint that Stalin had placed on the movement our parents had served."
   
   Interestingly, a lot of this generation, its leaders I'm speaking about specifically, were born in red diapers, that is, were born to members of the socialist vanguard that existed in the 1920s 1930s. Hence the commonplace phrase: "Like many radicals, he was a self-exiled son of the middle class."
   
   "He was a vociferous opponent of America's war in Vietnam and any American intervention anywhere. JFK was "an arch Cold warrior, a liberal agent of the imperial ruling class," in his view. He "harangued students about the dangers of radioactive fallout, and the dark forces in Washington that were leading us to `a universal grave.'" Horowitz was also an editor of "Ramparts," the magazine of the "New Left."
   
   But the Left didn't rise up because of the Vietnam issue. Rather, the author has a different take on this topic: "My speech illustrated the real importance of Vietnam to the radical cause, which was not ultimately about Vietnam but about our own antagonism to America, our desire for revolution. Vietnam served to justify the desire; we needed the war and its violent images to vindicate our destructive intentions."
   
   The arrival on the scene of an organization such as the Black Panthers reinforced this view. Mr. Horowitz knew these people and when asked by a Panther's member to suggest someone that could help a community center run by the Panthers manage their finances he recommended fellow leftist Betty Van Patter. Betty, some speculated later, asked too many questions about the Panthers' money and as a result disappeared. "When her body finally turned up and the future was no longer unknown, I,' admitted the author, "was forced to confront myself in a way I never had to before." "I had to understand my relation to this deed, this murder of innocence, committed by my political comrades." Because the Panthers "had been made the symbol of the revolution, they could not be condemned without negative consequences for everything we stood for and had said." "I had schooled myself in Hegel and Marx, and where had they led me? I had worshipped the gods of reason, and they had delivered me into the company of killers." "Until now, my political comrades had felt like a family I could trust. We had all been recruited from the same tribe of sentiment, raging with common indignation over the injustices we perceived, and sharing visions of a retribution that would make things right." "But a mother of three, who was also one of us, had been murdered by people we knew." "There were dozens, if not hundreds, of activists with direct links to the Party...who were aware of what happened to Betty. Yet no one came forward." "This silence was more than unusual for people who normally felt compelled to protest injustices---even those that took place at the far ends of the earth." But for Betty "there was only silence." "The incident had no usable political meaning, and was therefore best forgotten."
   
   "We thought of ourselves as self-effacing, but in fact we were arrogant. We regarded ourselves as better than others from our privileged caste who were unwilling to perform the deeds we did. That was why we didn't listen and couldn't see. Like all radicals, we were intoxicated by our own virtue."
   
   And what about the media, why didn't they investigate this murder, or other murders by the Black Panthers? Or expose the issue of who filled the jails of Cuba, or Russia? Well, because, as the author eventually realized there exists an odd operating principle within the Left: "The responsibility of progressive journalists was to suppress facts that hurt the progressive cause, and to print only those truths that served it."
   
   Thus Jimmy Carter's "decision, in 1979, to let the Sandinistas take power in Nicaragua without American intervention" was cheered by journalists and those on the Left in general, but not by Mr. Horowitz. When it came time to choose between Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan in 1984 (another Orwellian moment, this time in Nicaragua) the author had had enough, and voted for the first time in his life for a Republican, this while a new generation was organizing "solidarity committees" to support the Sandinistas. It was one thing to support Castro when he promised everything under the sun for Cuba but, unlike other Leftists, Mr. Horowitz couldn't continue to support Castro after it was apparent to all but the blind that "Cuba had been transformed into a totalitarian state, its economy ruined by socialist plans, its jails filled with political dissenters." "Nor was the tragedy of Cuba unique. Every socialist state created by Marxists had been transformed into an economic sinkhole and a national prison. There were no exceptions."
   
   And the Sandinistas were Marxist protégés of Castro, after all "This time, "he posited, "I could not plead ignorance of what was going to happen if radicals had their way."
   
   Having watched history unfold he came to the view "that socialists had contrived to demonstrate by bloody example what everyone else already knew: Equality and freedom are inherently in conflict. This was really all that socialist efforts had shown, over the dead bodies of millions of people. In talent, intelligence, and physical attributes, individuals were by nature different and unequal; consequently, the attempt to make them equal could only be achieved by restricting---ultimately eliminating---their individual freedom." He reflected on his own children: "The four children we had spawned were all so different in character and disposition that they posed a challenge to my radical worldview. The belief that environment shaped human destinies, and that therefore human character could be molded in some fundamental way, was essential to all utopian schemes. You could not change the world if you could not change the people in it."
   "Socialism could not even achieve the general welfare that its adherents promised. Socialist efforts to create economic equality invariably led, in practice, to the imposition of poverty on society as a whole, because socialism destroyed the incentives to produce. There were entire socialist libraries devoted to the confiscation and division of existing wealth, but not a single article on how people were motivated to create wealth. Socialists did not know how to make a society work. That was the lesson of the Communist debacle, which the Left had refused to learn. "The revolutionary failures of the Twentieth Century had demonstrated the wisdom of the American founding, and validated its tenets: private property, individual rights, and a limited state."
   
   "The idea of original sin---that we are born flawed, that the capacity for evil is lodged within us (no matter how our consciousness may be raised)---would have instilled in me a necessary caution about individuals like Huey Newton, [of the Blank Panthers] and movements like ours."
   
   "If evil was a choice that any individual could make, then human beings would always pose a danger to each other, and there could be no `withering away of the state'. There would always be a need for law above individuals, for police to enforce the law, and for prisons to contain those who broke it." After all, "how could we dispense with `bourgeois' law, the best system of rules and institutions yet devised to protect individuals from the predations of their government and each other?"
   
   Horowitz, because of this book and his outspokenness, has been demonized for having had second thoughts and has been subjected to savage personal attacks by his former comrades. The "problem" is that the world "is (and must remain) forever imperfect. The refusal to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age."
   
   Mr. Horowitz includes several pages of personal photographs in "Radical Son." The last page of these, interestingly, shows Mr. Horowitz with his mom, a picture of his dad alone (indicative of his lack of personal closeness with his father perhaps), and a photo of the author receiving an award from Ronald Reagan in 1991. In a way, the pictures seem to suggest the author's life; an estrangement and lack of closeness with his Marxist father, a father who never gave him his approval; a Marxist mother who eventually put family before politics; and finally, the individual, happy to accept a teaching award from a retired American president, that the author himself ultimately became.
   
   Thereafter he "become involved...with the idea of doing something of immediate benefit for people in the community." "I was tired," said he, "of pouring energy into grand abstractions like `the revolution,' and longed to see my efforts lead to practical results."



4. I wish I had read this years ago! As cultural history, Radical Son is as monumental as the Diary of Anne Frank - but Horowitz' autobiography is a literary masterpiece in its own right. Most importantly, Radical Son is one of the few honestly historical accounts of the campus movement that changed America from the inside out - and left Marxism as the official religion of our universities.
   
   If you wonder what our current presidential candidates mean when they call themselves "progressive" - then you really, REALLY need to read this book.



5. It falls short of classic, but frankly this is one of the most mind-altering things I've ever read. It's the closest I've ever gotten into the mind of a conservative (I'm a proud center-liberal), and it makes utterly believable a thesis I would have formerly thought ridiculous: that the bases for modern liberal thought, that universal human unity is necessary in order to avoid environmental or nuclear extinction, are lies manufactured by homegrown agents of Soviet Communism who populate modern journalism and academia.
   
   Horowitz never explicitly makes this claim, and that is the supreme flaw of the book. He leads you convincingly enough through his disillusionment with 60's student radicalism, and presents a detailed case that its roots lie with children of communists, like Horowitz himself. His account of the Black Panthers and the experience that would become his turning point make riveting reading. But, as others have pointed out, the narrative breaks down toward the end of the book. I was with him up to the point where he is coming to an acceptance of the inevitable persistence and humanity of markets, hierarchies, inequalities, etc. But the path out of the center left to the far right pronouncements of the latter third of the book is frustratingly spotty. The incendiary David Horowitz of Front Page Mag. fame pops up infrequently delivering party line zingers almost out of nowhere.
   
   This is especially frustrating for me, as Horowitz' growing fascination with the right during the 80's and 90's parallels a time when my parents were moving away from Reagan toward the left as they felt the growing influence of the similarly radical (as Horowitz admits) Goldwater republican movement. The appeal that this movement would have for Horowitz is strangely missing from the book. Horowitz briefly but memorably recounts the rebirth and justification of his firebrand rhetorical style, but doesn't expound on the conviction behind his latest ravings. He mentions authoritarian puritanical goons within the conservative movement, and never really retracts those statements, but, if they are really goons, why does he not distance himself from them? It's almost like a Straussian secret writing. So either he's paid or threatened to write his current outrageous stuff, OR
   
   ... and here I assume the thesis above. Horowitz ignores most of the arguments of the contemporary left, because they inevitably originate in an international community of academics and journalists who want America to be a socialist state simply because they grew up sons and daughters and friends of communists. The thing is, he might just be correct... and from now on, my life is going to be dedicated to finding out. If he isn't correct, I hope he lives long enough to be jarred once more out of a beautiful political dream.

No comments about Leon Metz Speaks on Six Gun Justice (1).

No comments about Martin Luther King, Jr: Young Man With a Dream, Library Edition (Ready Reader).

1 comments about Vanna Speaks.

1. You've seen the TV show and read the book. Now get the book on tape. Vanna underestimates her own talent. "You have to know the alphabet", she says. If you have always wondered - what is Vanna really like (see answer number 3, below), this is the tape for you. It is fifty minutes of pure Vanna.

   Do not get this tape because you are looking for a literary masterpiece. Buy this tape because you are a Wheel of Fortune fan! How many of us can say that we are the best in the world at what we do? There is no question, Vanna is the world's best letter turner (now letter presser). She performs her job with a fluidity of motion that no other letter turner can approach. Yes, there are others who do this. I have seen substitutes for Vanna on Wheel of Fortune, and Wheel of Fortune equivalent shows in other countries. (The most amusing is the Hungarian version where there are more vowels than consonants.) Vanna is the best.

   I have to admit to some level of prejudice. I met Vanna when I appeared on WOF as a contestant. The answers to your three questions are: (1) $55,618, (2) the money is taxed as income, (3) Vanna is very nice, but we do not keep in touch.

5 comments about Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic.

1. How much do you know about recent Chinese history? I knew a bit, but reading A Chinese Mosaic, by Betty Bao Lord, really brought the recent human tragedies of modern China home.

   Bao Lord intertwines two main themes: the story of her experiences as an American citizen who emigrated from China as a youngster and is returning as the wife of a American diplomat, and the stories of Chinese friends and acquaintances, often given to her on audio tape, and recounting the sordid and tragic tale of the last 50 years of China. She does all this against the backdrop of the mid to late 1980s and the Tiananmen Square protests by college students.

   This book derives much of its power from the simple stories Bao Lord relates. Whether it's the man who stays alive locked in his office (for years) because his son flys a kite to reminds his father of his presence, or the stories of the real life excesses of the Red Guards, burning any of the "Four Olds," these stories are touching and real. Even her own family story has a certain pathos, as we learn about her grandfather dying three years before she was able to visit, her aunt calmly dying of cancer, and a sister who only learned that she was adopted by happenstance.

   The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the other major events of modern Chinese history are only touched on as they affect the people in the stories told, but even that was enough to shock me with what this nation endured. In fact, it's even more shocking than it was when I read about it in the history books, because the folks in the stories are real people.




2. Bao Lord's book is a montage of stories about her family and friends in China against first, the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, and then Tienamen Square in 1989. There have been many books that have come out in the 1990's on the Cultural revolution, an unimaginably painful period of 10 years in China during which Mao Zedong turned the people against one another as a way of deflecting challenges to his own power. The country descended into chaos as the Red Guard, basically a group of millions of teenagers set loose, destroyed everything in its path. Thirty million people died during this period! It is hard to imagine living through what Bao Lord's characters have endured--betrayal by relatives and friends, the death of a child, imprisonment for no reason, torture, the destruction of education, art and culture--it goes on and on. Many of these stories are told in the characters' own words, transcribed from audio tapes sent to her by people who wanted their stories told. The stories of Bao Lord's own family are equally absorbing, especially of her grandmother, who defied tradition and paid the price.

   I listened to the audio version of this book, read by the author. Generally I find that professional readers do a better job, but this book was an exception--Bao Lord reads with great emotion in a slightly inflected voice but otherwise no acccent. She does an excellent job.

   Anyone traveling to China is well-advised to read several memoirs of modern China. It is easy to look at China today and see rapid modernization, signs of free enterprise, and a bustling economy. Books like Bao Lord's remind us that China has a long way to go.




3. This is the most amazing book I read in a while, in touch me in all the ways possible. I simply love this book so much. It is a story telling that one could not be found anywhere else. Bette Bao Lord surpasses Amy Tan with Spring Moon. Peerless in its artisry and beauty, Lord has done wonders.



4. This book is filled with fascinating anecdotes about the cultural revolution. I had visited China shortly before reading it and felt everyone should go there as you don't appreciate the society you live in without contrast. For example, there is an anecdote about a fellow whose wife was sent away by the government and he missed being together with her so much that at dinner he set her place and got into her clothing so as to feel she were still with him. What this book did for me was make me more aware of how we all are at the mercy of social currents and this awareness enables me to accept my helplessness and helps me to dissipate my anger. Peace of mind, afforded by knowledge, not ignorance is worth a great deal to me. This book, I found, easy to read and educational.



5. The author of Spring Moon, the story of her sister's youth in China during the Cultural Revolution, has written another book, a collection of stories of hard life in China during the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, up to the disaster in Tiananmen Square. Shanghai born Bette Bao Lord uses her skill at explaining China by drawing on her early life there, and her family, cultural, and literary connections to China. These stories are short biographies, mostly autobiographical, of artists, educator, writers, and intellectuals caught up in the turmoil so constant in China over recent centuries. She interweaves these stories with her own, of the times she accompanied her husband, Winston Lord, to the region in his various government positions, but primary while he served as Ambassador from 1985-89. Similar to the couple itself, both halves of the book are interesting without its partner, but complement each other and create a whole greater than if they stood alone. Lord has an intimate touch with both her identities, Chinese and American, and explains the conflict she often feels without over sensitive grousing. She accepts it and attempts to reconcile the two, without dwelling too much when she fails. Between her family and official connections, she was introduced to many Chinese whose pain is hard to read about. Its harder still to imagine oneself having to experience their lives and surviving. I was struck with their stoicism following their time as victim, or victimizer , and their apparent forgiveness of countrymen who abused them during China's time of troubles. I don't think I would be capable to forgive or even understand. Perhaps survival grants its' achievers skills in human emotion as its graduation present. Almost all the stories in the book were of Chinese immersed somehow in the culture elite of the country, those with whom Lord would come into contact. I want to know if their experiences were the norm for Chinese, or more prevalent of their contemporaries. The end of book came too abruptly for me, the two main stories, that of China and one of its daughters, remaining unfinished. Both their continuing stories will make for interesting lives, conversations, and books for the future.