About the Author

Hilary Spurling is the author of The Unknown Matisse, listed as one of the New York Times's Ten
Best Books of 1998, and Matisse the Master, which won the Los Angeles Times biography prize in 2005.

Reviews

Weaving a colorful tapestry of Pearl Buck's life (1892-1973) with strands of Chinese history and literature, Spurling, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize for Matisse the Master-vividly correlates Buck's experiences of China's turbulent times to her novels. Growing up in a missionary family in China, Buck lived through the upheavals of the Boxer Rebellion and China's civil war, two marriages, and a daughter with a degenerative disease; her closeup view of the horrors of China's extreme rural poverty made her an American literary celebrity as well as a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize winner when she enshrined her observations of China in the Good Earth trilogy. Back in the United States, having opened America's eyes to China, Buck worked to repeal America's discriminatory laws against the Chinese and established an adoption agency for minority and mixed race children. For her support of racial equality, Buck was blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer even as her books were banned in Communist China "for spreading reactionary, imperialist lies"; Spurling's fast-paced and compassionate portrait of a writer who described the truth before her eyes without ideological bias, whose personal life was as tumultuous as the times she lived in, will grip readers who, unlike Spurling, didn't grow up reading Buck's work. (June) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.

Spurling (The Unknown Matisse, Matisse the Master) explores the contradictions in writer Buck's life and works. Buck, the daughter of a fundamentalist Christian missionary, spoke Chinese before learning English and spent more time in China than America. Her family, both her birth family and the family she built with her second husband, had to flee China on more than one occasion owing to political turmoil. Her works achieved an enormous amount of success, especially her second novel, The Good Earth (after East Wind, West Wind), during her lifetime. They were best sellers, and she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, yet they have been largely ignored in recent years. Spurling's biography examines Buck's childhood, the influences that informed her writing, and the marriage that ultimately brought her happiness. Verdict Readers and academics interested in China will most likely find the book appealing. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/10; ebook ISBN 978-1-4391-8044-0.]-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.