Search for Modern China ANNOTATION
Covering more than four centuries of epic history with unsurpassed learning, imagination, and passion, Spence tells a story of vast struggle, of exhilarating dreams and crushed lives, and above all of the sheer capacity of the human spirit to endure. Professor of history at Yale University and author of numerous works on China, Spence shows the reader a world struggling to remake itself and establish harmony in light of recent events.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
In this widely acclaimed history of modern China, Jonathan Spence achieves a fine blend of narrative richness and efficiency. Praised as "a miracle of readability and scholarly authority," (Jonathan Mirsky) The Search for Modern China offers a matchless introduction to China's history.
Author Biography: Jonathan D. Spence is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, where he has taught for thirty years. He has been awarded MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The Search for Modern China won the Lionel Gelber Award and the Kiriyama Book Prize.
FROM THE CRITICS
Boston Globe
A remarkable achievement...vivid...fluent, graceful.... A publishing event.
Washington Post Book World
History at its best...all in the vivid, accessible style for which the author is well known.
New York Times
Monumental.... History that is always lively, always concrete, always comprehensible.
Publishers Weekly
Spence advocates democracy in China and presents contemporary views of its oppressive history, including Chiang Kai-Shek's fascist supporters and the bloodbath known as the Cultural Revolution. ``A splendid achievement, this sweeping . . . epic chronicle compresses four centuries of political and social change into a sharply observant narrative,'' said Publishers Weekly.
New York Times Books of the Century
[Spence] shows, rahter than tells, the continuity of Chinese history....This superb history will challenge and enrich Western thinking about contemporary China.
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