Biography buck cultural pearl s
Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography
What I didn't know was how much of an advocate Buck was for women, blacks and Amerasian children.
What I also didn't know was that, like many aging women, she fell prey to a younger man who was a dishonest opportunist.
What I remember well, personally, was that, during the Cultural Revolution, Buck, as a preeminent American writer of Chinese village life, was denounced as an "American cultural imperialist." Buck was "heartbroken" when she was prevented from visiting China with Richard Nixon in 1972.
If you are interested in Pearl Buck, you could get by on a less erudite,intensive biography than this.
In 1949, outraged that existing adoption services considered Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable, Buck established Welcome House, Inc., the first international, interracial adoption agency. In nearly five decades of work, Welcome House has placed over five thousand children.
One of the children was the author's daughter.
Note: I cut and pasted a few sentences from Wikipedia in my review.
Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography
Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography
Pearl S. Buck was one of the most renowned, interesting, and controversial figures ever to influence American and Chinese cultural and literary history--and yet she remains one of the least studied, honored, or remembered. In this narrative, Conn traces the the parallel course of American and Chinese history. This "cultural biography" thus offers a dual portrait: of Buck, a figure greater than history cares to remember, and of the era she helped to shape.
A Chinese translation will be published by Nanjing University Press in 1997.
Contents: Preface: Rediscovering Pearl Buck; 1; Missionary Childhood; 2; New Worlds; 3; Winds of Change; 4; The Good Earth; 5; An Exile's Return; 6; The Prize; 7; Wartime; 8; Losing Battles; 9; Pearl Sydenstricker;
Subject: literature
1996 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 c. 496 pp. 41 halftones 2 line diagrams 1 map
Hardback 0-521-56080-2 $29.95
Source: Cambridge University Press
Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography
Peter Conn. Cambridge University Press, $70 (500pp) ISBN 978-0-521-56080-1
In this brilliantly conceived biography, Conn, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, sets out to reconstruct Buck's life, her extraordinary commitment to social justice and her literary achievement. To her many (primarily male) critics, Buck was an overrated storyteller whose best-selling portrayals of Chinese peasants struggling in a land on the brink of revolution in no way merited the Pulitzer or Nobel prizes. Time and the reading public seem to have agreed, as only The Good Earth survives--principally as a late-night movie classic. Born in West Virginia in 1892 to Protestant missionary parents, Pearl Sydenstricker spent almost all of her first 40 years in China. Although she was bilingual, she felt an outsider in both countries, and Conn speculates that her experiences in China's white minority led to a lifelong advocacy of interracial understanding. She went to college in the U.S., but returned to China, where she married her first husband, J. Lossing Buck, and gave birth to her only child, who suffered from phenylketonuria (PKU). Then, in 1934, faced with the Japanese invasion, civil tensions and escalating anti-foreigner sentiment, the Bucks returned to the U.S. As her literary works slipped into obscurity, Buck spent the decades until her death in 1973 devoting herself to issues of interracial conflict, immigration and the adoption of disadvantaged children, eventually establishing Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency. Perhaps Buck's fortunes have finally turned, for she has been singularly lucky in her biographer. Drawing on Buck's own words and actions, Conn steers a sympathetic yet intelligently balanced course, revealing in fascinating detail the gripping life story of a compelling woman. Photos. (Oct.)
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Reviewed on: 08/26/1996
Genre: Nonfiction
Open Ebook - 978-1-316-036
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