Notes From China

New York: Collier Books, 1972. First Collier Books Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing. Mass market paperback. Good. Barbara Tuchman (Photographer) and Alma Tuchman (P. xiii,[1], 112, [2] pages. Map. Illustrations. Name of the previous owner in ink on the first page. The front cover states: The original uncut text of the Notes and the newsmaking essay, "If Mao Had Come to Washington in 1945" from Foreign Affairs. Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (January 30, 1912 - February 6, 1989) was an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August (1962), a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971), a biography of General Joseph Stilwell. Following graduation, Wertheim worked as a volunteer research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York, spending a year in Tokyo in 1934-35, including a month in China, then returning to the United States via the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow and on to Paris. She also contributed to The Nation as a correspondent until her father's sale of the publication in 1937, traveling to Valencia and Madrid to cover the Spanish Civil War. A first book resulted from her Spanish experience, The Lost British Policy: Britain and Spain Since 1700, published in 1938. Tuchman favored a literary approach to the writing of history, providing eloquent explanatory narratives rather than concentration upon discovery and publication of fresh archival sources. In the words of one biographer, Tuchman was "not a historian's historian; she was a layperson's historian who made the past interesting to millions of readers". Notes from China is a 1972 nonfiction book by Barbara Tuchman, based on her travels in China immediately following Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China, depicting both rural and urban life in China during the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong. The book was one of Western audiences' first glimpses into post-Qing China. A journalistic tour de force, this wide-ranging collection by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Stilwell and the American Experience in China is a classic in its own right. During the summer of 1972—a few short months after Nixon's legendary visit to China—master historian Barbara W. Tuchman made her own trip to that country, spending six weeks in eleven cities and a variety of rural settlements. The resulting reportage was one of the first evenhanded portrayals of Chinese culture that Americans had ever read. Tuchman's observations capture the people as they lived, from workers in the city and provincial party bosses to farmers, scientists, and educators. She demonstrates the breadth and scope of her expertise in discussing the alleviation of famine, misery, and exploitation; the distortion of cultural and historical inheritances into ubiquitous slogans; news media, schools, housing, and transportation; and Chairman Mao's techniques for reasserting the Revolution. This edition also includes Tuchman's "fascinating" (The New York Review of Books) essay, "If Mao Had Come to Washington in 1945"—a tantalizing piece of speculation on a proposed meeting between Mao and Roosevelt that would have changed the course of postwar history. "Shrewdly observed . . . Tuchman enters another plea for coolness, intelligence and rationality in American Asian policies. One can hardly disagree."—The New York Times Book Review.