The Man Who Stayed Behind - Hardcover

Sidney Rittenberg; Amanda Bennett

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671735950 ISBN 13: 9780671735951

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1993

Synopsis

Rittenberg studied Chinese at Stanford in 1943 hoping for a short tour of duty in China and a return home at the end of the war. Instead, appalled by the conditions he found there, he joined the Chinese Communist Party and remained in China for 35 years, 16 of which were spent in prison in solitary confinement. Writer Bennett helps him tell his unique story. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

“[The Man Who Stayed Behind] reads like a riveting historical novel. But there’s no fiction here . . . it’s Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the Long March, solitary confinement, despair, romance, and redemption. Sidney Rittenberg’s story is a classic.”—Mike Wallace, CBS-TV 60 Minutes

“I found The Man Who Stayed Behind hard to put down. No American has ever merged as fully, hopefully—and disastrously—with Communist China as Rittenberg did for four decades from the 1940s. The book is lively, poignant, and revealing. Rittenberg offers a window on Beijing politics that anyone seriously interested in China’s recent past and likely future should read.”—Ross Terrill, author of China in Our Time

“Rittenberg has written a modern day Pilgrim’s Progress, in which he wanders through thirty-five years of Chinese power struggles with his idealism—or perhaps naivete—astoundingly intact.”—Russell Watson, Newsweek

“Sidney Rittenberg has had one of the most remarkable lives of anyone I have ever met. The story of his life is not only a fascinating and valuable witness to one of the greatest historical upheavals of [the twentieth] century, but is a vivid testimony to the power of good in the midst of evil.”—Billy Graham

“An extraordinary and revealing account of how someone was swept into the Chinese Communist movement and stayed with it through its many blunders, excesses, and cruelties. . . . A fascinating autobiography—honest, moving, chilling, and quite illuminating.”—Dr. Michel Oksenberg, Former National Security Council Aid on China Policy

“For more than a decade, I have been recording Chinese stories of hope, imprisonment, and disillusion. Nowhere is that story told more poignantly, honestly, or compellingly than in this book. . . . [It] is fascinating, excruciatingly honest, painful to read, and destined to be a classic in the literature of gods that have failed.”—Anne F. Thurston, the Boston Globe

“The gripping saga of an expatriate whose extraordinary experiences left him without illusions about Marxism—but with his personal ideals triumphantly intact.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Rittenberg lived a strange life, but he is not a stranger. Seen from the inside, his ‘life of perks, privilege, and deluded complicity’ makes sense. In the ultimate test of good autobiography, we see with a shock how it could have been us.”—Andrew J. Nathan, the Washington Post

From the Back Cover:

"["The Man Who Stayed Behind"] reads like a riveting historical novel. But there's no fiction here . . . it's Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the Long March, solitary confinement, despair, romance, and redemption. Sidney Rittenberg's story is a classic."--Mike Wallace, CBS-TV "60 Minutes"

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0671735950
• ISBN 13: 9780671735951
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480