![]() ![]() Don't let that keep you from giving it a try, though, for by some strange mechanism, it also ranks among the most uplifting books I've read, chronicling as it does a courage, resilience and will to survive which are nothing short of riveting. Wild Swans may well be the most depressing book I've ever read. Born just a few decades apart, their lives overlap with the end of the warlords' regime and overthrow of the Japanese occupation, violent struggles between the Kuomintang and the Communists to carve up China, and, most poignant for the author, the vicious cycle of purges orchestrated by Chairman Mao that discredited and crushed millions of people, including her parents. Chang herself marched, worked, and breathed for Mao until doubt crept in over the excesses of his policies and purges. Her gently raised mother struggled with hardships in the early days of Mao's revolution and rose, like her husband, to a prominent position in the Communist Party before being denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Chang's grandmother was a warlord's concubine. ![]() In Wild Swans Jung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century. An alternative cover for this ISBN can be found here ![]()
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