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Summary: Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Review: This book should be required reading for everyone. Not only is it gripping, fast paced, full of human interest, but it is also educational - it's the inside story of life in China, particularly through the Cultural Revolution. I thought I knew about the Cultural Revolution until I read this book - now I understand it far better, and can now better appreciate references to it in current news.
This would be an excellent book for high school students. It certainly helps us appreciate America.
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Summary: Gripping, fascinating
Review: Originally, I had to read this book for a college course on Asian history. However, since then I have had to purchase two more copies of it, because I keep loaning mine out because I believe this book is so good I want my friends to read it. This book opened my eyes to Chinese history, of which I knew nothing before this. The story is engrossing not just for it's characters (the fact that these characters actually lived makes the book even more relevant and dramatic) but for the sweeping historical events these people lived through. I am a voracious reader and this is one of my all time favorites.
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Summary: an interesting book
Review: I had to read this for a class. Who would have thought that I would have enjoyed it. It is a true story but is very intertaining. It gives you a look into china that most don't get the chance to see. You get to learn China's history from a personal point of view. I learned things I never knew and heard more about things I had heard of but never with any detail-ex. the feet binding.
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Summary: A Story of Courage and Tyranny
Review: Wild Swans is a candid and harrowing account of three remarkable Chinese women -grandmother, mother and daughter- but also gives us a very good picture of what China was like from the turn of the Century to the 1980's
We learn about the ancient culture of the Chinese which included much that was beautiful and some that seems cruel. We learn of the hope of so many Chinese that the overthrow of the Kuomintang would lead to a' just social order' but how it soon became clear that the worst excesses of the Kuomintang and those of Imperial China before that paled into insignificance compared to the hell on earth created by Mao's Chinese Communist Party
One is left aghast that a system can destroy even the most basic human instincts of decency and compassion while turning people into inhumane monsters totally possessed -as if by a demon - by a cruel and totally destructive system
It sends shivers down one's spine to realise that 'The Great Helmsman' Mao Ze Dong -who ranks with Hitler and Stalin as among the most evil men of the 20th century-had his image worn on T-shirts by 'progressive' students and youth in the west and these same young 'champions of equality' hung large pictures of Mao in their dormitory rooms .This at the same time as millions of Chinese were being slaughtered and physically and psychologically maimed on the orders of Mao and his Chinese Communist Party -as described in this book.
Today many in the West laud the economic 'reforms' towards a type of totalitarian 'capitalist' system but fail to remember that human rights have not improved at all and China is still a hideous and inhuman hell for hundreds of millions of its inhabitants. And the world turns a blind eye and wards Beijing the 2008 Olympic While we a re left asking how much longer the people of China will remain enslaved by their inhumane Communist masters. How Long?
But the book is also about the strength of the human spirit , about wonderful people-especially the three remarkable women who are the central characters of this book- as well as the cruel ones
It is a story of love and hate, strength and weakness , the beautiful and the ugly
But more than anything it is about how the human spirit can never in the end be crushed by cruelty, evil and tyranny
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Summary: A 2 for 1 Special!
Review: In Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China author Jung Chang chronicles the three generations of her grandmother, her mother, and herself as they struggle to survive the perpetual wars and violent instabilities of life in China from the early 1930's to the late 1970's. The title stems from the Mandarin character for "wild swan" which is incorporated in the name of the author's mother (Hong). The bitter struggles of the three heroines and their extended families provide the reader with an agonizing glimpse of the fear in which hundreds of millions of Chinese lived throughout WWII, the civil war between the Communist Party and Chaing Kai-shek's Kuomintang army, and Mao's Cultural Revolution. Chang essentially teaches an elementary course in the history of the People's Republic of China and Communist Party politics while also narrating a gripping, moving, and ultimately unsettling story about family, loss, and love.The strength of Wild Swans lies in its illumination of Chinese middle-class life, a subject that has largely remained shrouded. The narrative is experienced most intensely during the unraveling of the family at the height of Mao's Cultural Revolution. The targets of the revolution are Communist Party officials, dubbed "capitalist-roaders" and "class enemies", which includes Chang's mother and father. As student rebels arbitrarily classify officials as class enemies, the noose slowly tightens around Chang's family. The description of Mao's witch-hunt painfully illustrates the constant terror and fear of middle class life fueled by Communist Party propaganda and disinformation. Reading Wild Swans brought tears to my eyes and chills to my skin. The three daughters of China are heroines who survive inhuman conditions and manipulation. The narrative yields two compelling story lines. One is a story of Chinese culture, family, loss, and love. The other story describes the atrocities inflicted by Mao Zedong on his own people, which left me thirsting for a deeper understanding of modern Chinese history.
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Summary: did you ever stop to think before you read this book?
Review: I recently spent six months in Beijing studying mandarin at a university. This was essential reading among the international student population. For a country with such a formidable, weighted reputation, where nothing is small, a tome like this one is rather fitting. It pointed to alot of answers in china today, left me aghast and amazed. Its sensitive to talk about, and left me wondering where exactly china stands today, a decade on from where the author left the book. It was heavy reading, I wanted it all at once, but i had to keep on taking breathers. Alot of people can be quite racsist nowadays to the overseas chinese, but this book could give those sorts a good dose of empathy. I was left wondering why we all know of the Nazi holocaust, but not of the Cultural Revolution. Essential reading for anyone who wants to broaden their global outlook, especially to do with China. huge.
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Summary: Be Thankful For What You Have
Review: You will find no new age propaganda on self help here. This is about actualities and truths, holding a mirror to beauty from absolute ugliness and in the end showing a reflection of us all. An in depth piece that is as rich in story telling as it is in educating, Jung Chang is a hero and her book is a gift to everyone. An important book well deserving of your time and respect.
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Summary: A masterpiece
Review: It must be extremely difficult to remain objective when writing a biography of yourself and your family when the setting is as tragic as 20th Century China. This book surpasses the excellent Victor Villasenor family history of his Mexican family's exodus to the United STates by providing a great deal of historical and political background to her incredible story. So, you not only get the remarkable story of her struggle through the excesses of Mao's China; but she more than adequately outlines the reasons for these excesses. Tragedy often affords certain individuals to display a courage and patience that inspires and instills optimism in the human condition. Ms. Chung writes a very human and moving account of one woman's struggle and triumphant over a society gone mad. I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in the China and toll Mao's ego inflicted on his own people.
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Summary: Based on previous reviews, I wanted to like this book. BUT.
Review: The subject matter is clearly fascinating . . . an insider's description of the turbulent history of China over the past 150 years . . . And yet ultimately the book disappoints. The writing is stilted and often turgid . . .where was the editor? The high drama of China reads like an old-fashioned text book, and reminds me why I used to "hate history" in school. A good editor or secondary writer could have made this a blockbuster. I'm sorry. It didn't work for me.
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Summary: History Of China
Review: Wild Swans by Jung Chang is the true story of her life and that of her mother and grandmother in China during China's transformation from a country suffering from war,poverty and corruption to a communist state. Yet as I read this book I was amazed at how much history it contained about communism, Mao and the cultural revolution.The book starts with Jung's Grandmother becoming a concubine to a warlord in 1924 when China was in choas she then marries a Manchu doctor.Her daughter grows up in China under the Japanese but when China is liberated she joins the communist underground believing they can save China from the Kuomintang's corrupt and unjust ways.She later meets and marries Jung's father who is a devout communist.Jung enjoys a privileged childhood thanks to parents positions in the communist party .But when the cultural revolution begins it destroys her and her families way of life forever.This is an excellent and moving story about three daughers of China.But in the end the person I felt most sorry for was Jung's father who believed so much in communism only to be wrongfully persecuted and find everything he believed in was all in vain.This book helped me to understand a crucial time in China's history.I highly recommend this book.
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