Volume 29, Number 8 · May 13, 1982
Emperor of China Studies
By David S. Nivison
Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir
by John King Fairbank
Harper & Row/A Cornelia and Michael Bessie Book, 480 pp., $20.00
Huang Tsung-hsi, the Chinese historian and philosopher who was born in 1610 in Chekiang, once said of himself that he had lived out three incarnations in one lifetime—first as a young man passionately engaged in late Ming partisan politics, then as a loyalist in the resistance to the Manchus, and finally as a scholar 'in retirement,' not in public office, writing his many books and teaching his many students who became the next generation of scholars. John King Fairbank, born in 1907 in Huron, South Dakota, might well be tempted to say something like this of his own odyssey. His life and his achievements are different, but the changes of pace and purpose are equally dramatic.
Review, 3589 words
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