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Pearl Buck In China: Journey To The Good Earth (2010)

by Hilary Spurling(Favorite Author)

3.79 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1416540423 (ISBN13: 9781416540427)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Simon & Schuster

review 1: Rating this book was difficult for me. Hilary Spurling did a great job of researching her subject matter. She wrote a cohesive and informative biography about a woman whose life was fascinating. I felt it was a bit too scholarly to read well. I appreciate scholarship in biography, but I also like to think I am reading about a real person that I come to know well. I can't decide if Pearl Buck became a flat character in the hands of her biographer who only was represented by quoting what she wrote about herself, or if she was such a complex character that her biographer could not truly uncover who she was. The author seemed to only tell us what Pearl Buck did, experienced, and wrote. Any interpretation of the works of Pearl Buck, her life, and her times seemed to be p... moreurely subjective. In the end, I knew much more about Pearl Buck when I finished the book than I did before I read it, but I did not believe I ever really got to know Pearl Buck or understand her. She remains a bit of enigma to me. Long held beliefs that I thought I knew about her from reading her books of fiction and from reading about her in the press when I was a child were changed. I don't think she is a person one can easily understand, so I don't want to fault the author for not shedding more light on this complex personality who could be thought of as bilingual and bicultural. In truth, Pearl Buck was probably much more Chinese than American in her thinking and in her understanding of the world. Perhaps, these factors made Buck unable to know who she really was herself. Perhaps, that is why we can't know or understand her.
review 2: Pearl Buck had a fascinating childhood in China. Her parents were quite unique and Spurling paintsan exhausting picture of their missionary life. I think she leans too heavily on wanting to get inside their heads to figure out and explain their motivation. The book made me realize how arrogant and self focused white missionaries can be in order to spend their lives insisting people from other cultures would be better off behaving like Christians. Buck's life as a successful writer was a marked contrast to her childhood. less

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