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正在检索... Branch | Book | 920 B 85 | 1 | Non-fiction Collection | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
正在检索... Central | Book | B BUCK P. | 1 | Biography Collection | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
正在检索... Science | Book | 813.54 B855ZC, 1996 | 1 | Stacks | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
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摘要
摘要
One of the most popular novelists of the twentieth century, winner of a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize for Literature and an active social and political campaigner, particularly in the field of women's issues and Asian-American relations, Pearl Buck has, until now, remained 'hidden in public view'. Best known, perhaps, as the prolific author of The Good Earth, Buck led a career which extended well beyond her eighty works of fiction and non-fiction and deep into the public sphere. In this critically acclaimed biography, Peter Conn retrieves Pearl Buck from the footnotes of literary and cultural history and reinstates her as a figure of compelling and uncommon significance in twentieth-century literary, cultural and political history.
评论 (5)
出版社周刊评论
In this brilliantly conceived biography, Conn, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, sets out to reconstruct Buck's life, her extraordinary commitment to social justice and her literary achievement. To her many (primarily male) critics, Buck was an overrated storyteller whose best-selling portrayals of Chinese peasants struggling in a land on the brink of revolution in no way merited the Pulitzer or Nobel prizes. Time and the reading public seem to have agreed, as only The Good Earth survivesprincipally as a late-night movie classic. Born in West Virginia in 1892 to Protestant missionary parents, Pearl Sydenstricker spent almost all of her first 40 years in China. Although she was bilingual, she felt an outsider in both countries, and Conn speculates that her experiences in China's white minority led to a lifelong advocacy of interracial understanding. She went to college in the U.S., but returned to China, where she married her first husband, J. Lossing Buck, and gave birth to her only child, who suffered from phenylketonuria (PKU). Then, in 1934, faced with the Japanese invasion, civil tensions and escalating anti-foreigner sentiment, the Bucks returned to the U.S. As her literary works slipped into obscurity, Buck spent the decades until her death in 1973 devoting herself to issues of interracial conflict, immigration and the adoption of disadvantaged children, eventually establishing Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency. Perhaps Buck's fortunes have finally turned, for she has been singularly lucky in her biographer. Drawing on Buck's own words and actions, Conn steers a sympathetic yet intelligently balanced course, revealing in fascinating detail the gripping life story of a compelling woman. Photos. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
With The Good Earth author's visibility almost as low as when she was a missionary wife in China, Conn's biography tries to refocus on her role as an outspoken critic of imperialism, and as a supporter of feminism and racial equality. Although Buck was a Nobel and Pulitzer prizewinning novelist- -one who can claim credit for the first popular, realistic portrayals of China in America--her reputation suffered a swift decline after her death. An evaluative biography is overdue, but Conn's academic work seems an uncomfortable mix, part history primer, part summary survey of Buck's life. Its portrait of Buck is less detailed--and less engaging--than that to be found in her biographies of her evangelical missionary parents or in her own memoirs. Conn (English/Univ. of Pennsylvania) has gathered a great deal of information about China in the 19th and early 20th centuries, tracing its history from the Boxer Rebellion up to the Chinese civil war. He tries to place Buck's lonely childhood in China with her Calvinist father and homesick mother, her bicultural education, and her frustrated marriage to a hardworking but distant agricultural expert and missionary within the larger context of events in China--but he fails to integrate the two levels of narrative. When her second novel, The Good Earth, brought her sudden, skyrocketing fame, she settled in America, only to find her rosy expatriate patriotism at odds with native jingoism, racism, and sexism. For the rest of her career, while she continued to churn out novels, she also became an outspoken critic of American foreign policy and segregation, a supporter of women's rights, and a promoter of international/interracial adoption, facts just as dimmed now as her literary status. Conn's fact-filled book goes some way to resuscitate Buck's career and strong opinions, but Buck herself remains a shadowy figure. (41 photos, map, not seen)
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Conn's motive in writing the life of the first female American Nobel laureate for literature is to restore her once prodigious reputation. Every page of his biography discloses another stirring experience, another good deed done, another worthy cause championed. Born to Christian missionaries in China, Pearl learned both English and Chinese and to love the Chinese common people. She endured her proselytizing father's neglect and her mother's descent into bitterness and regret. She saw firsthand the violence of civil war and the brutal subjection of women in China. She suffered a bad first marriage, her daughter's irremediable retardation, and a hysterectomy. And then she turned into crusading steel. The success of The Good Earth (1931) made her the foremost Western authority on China, and the Nobel gave her prestige that she used to advance worldwide the rights of women, children, and nonwhite people. She advocated the ERA when few women's groups would, denounced racism unconditionally when nearly no other famous whites would, and, after the Korean War, created Welcome House to see to the support and adoption of abandoned Amerasian children. Her last years were sad, but with straightforward prose and balanced assessment of her accomplishments, Conn convinces us that Pearl Buck was a great person, indeed. --Ray Olson
Choice 评论
This biography is the best available scholarly discussion of a remarkably popular author and Nobel laureate who has been neglected by most literary historians. Like Paul A. Doyle (Pearl S. Buck, CH, Nov'65; rev. ed., 1980) and Nora Stirling (Pearl Buck: A Woman in Conflict, 1983), Conn (Univ. of Pennsylvania) provides a sympathetic but balanced overview of Buck's nonfiction and fiction, including The Good Earth (1931), a best-selling novel that won the Pulitzer Prize. Conn surpasses these earlier biographers, however, in so thoroughly exploring the author's lifelong relationship with China. A daughter and wife of missionaries, the bilingual Buck spent the first half of her life in Asia. Her experience as an outsider had a great impact on her books and on the many causes she championed--from birth control to civil rights--in the face of criticism from both liberals and conservatives. "Never before or since has one writer so personally shaped the imaginative terms in which America addresses a foreign culture," Conn persuasively argues. The father of a child adopted through Buck's Welcome House agency, Conn brings a personal interest to this absorbing and carefully documented study. Highly recommended as a valuable addition to all public and academic library collections. J. W. Hall University of Mississippi
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
Buck (1892-1973) knew the costs of cultural practices that oppress. A child of evangelical Protestant missionaries in China, she witnessed her father's accepted oppression of her mother via the Chinese caste system that trapped girls and women. Buck, who always considered herself an outsider, carried these thoughts with her when she left China to study in America. Later, her efforts on behalf of sexual and racial equality, religious diversity, world peace, birth control, interracial adoption, and humane treatment of handicapped people (her daughter Carol was retarded) fueled her personal autonomy and her prodigious output as a writer of fiction and nonfiction. The Good Earth (1931) brought her great popularity and the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1938 she won the Nobel. Aware that Buck's writing has fallen out of fashion, Conn (Literature in America, LJ 7/89) believes and proves that Buck helped enormously in forging an understanding of American and Chinese culture and deserves a place in American letters by virtue of her humanitarian work. His book is expertly written, not only as a biography but also as a political history. Highly recommended.Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
目录
Preface: RediscoveringPearl Buck |
1 Missionary childhood |
2 New worlds |
3 Winds of change |
4 The Good Earth |
5 An exile's return |
6 The prize |
7 Wartime |
8 Losing battles |
9 Pearl Sydenstricker |