A good book I'm just now reading -

[L E Bryan]

Sounds interesting. I’ll add it to my list of things to consider buying sometime when my stack of purchased but unread books gets below a dozen.

Last week I got up to books published in 1949, and started with “China Shakes the World” by Jack Belden.

Belden was an interesting fellow who lived an exceedingly interesting life and wrote about it in three books, “Retreat with Stilwell” (1943), “Still Time to Die” (1944) and “China Shakes the World” (1949).

After graduating from Colgate at the beginning of the depression, he bummed his way to San Francisco and talked his way onto a trans-Pacific freighter as a deck hand. By the time he got to Hong Kong he realized deckhand life was not for him so he jumped ship and bummed around China, teaching English and writing for an English languish(<—interesting spell checker choice!) newspaper. He joined the Kuomintang army as a war correspondent as they retreated from the Japanese, with articles  to AP, Life and Time. When General Stilwell arrived in China, he joined him and was with him when he walked out of Burma to India.

With not much happening in China, he switched wars to North Africa, covering both British and American efforts. He went ashore with the troops on three different amphibious landings, aways where the action was, under direct fire from the enemy. For a quick feeling of Belden's writing, “Still Time to Die” is available online, https://archive.org/stream/StillTimeToDie#page/n3/mode/2up. It covers both his China and North Africa adventures.

After the war his interest turned back to China and the revolution brewing there. So in 1947 back to China he went and made his way across the Kuomintang lines to the 8th Route Army where he wrote  about life and war on the communist side. This is the account in China Shakes the World.

Hmmm… this is a lot more than I intended to write. Thinking back on those times reminds me of Agnes Smedley but I’ll not go in to her equally adventuresome life.

Lawrence

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l