THE FIFTH BOOK OF PEACE - Scarce Fine Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing With Souvenir Material: Signed by Maxine Hong Kingston - SIGNED ON THE TITLE PAGE

Kingston, Maxine Hong

ISBN 10: 0679440755 / ISBN 13: 9780679440758

Published by New York City, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, 2003

About this Item

1st Printing. Signed. 402 pages. Published in 2003. The author's sequel to her debut novel, "Tripmaster Monkey". Her best book as such. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Fifth Book of Peace". The great author's retrieval project. Began fourteen years ago, Maxine Hong Kingston tentatively titled her book, "The Fourth Book of Peace", echoing a Chinese legend about The Three Books of Peace. As the legend went, the latter were all burned. So while we have innumerable Books on War, the secret to lasting peace has been elusive because there is no surviving text. As it happened, Hong Kingston's own manuscript was also destroyed when her home burned down, an uncannily suggestive personal disaster that made the author even more determined to start over and finish the book. Hence its title. "She re-creates her lost fictional narrative and sets it alongside an account of her life after the fire so that the Vietnam-era doings of her antic hero, Wittman Ah Sing, who moves to Hawaii to evade the draft, are juxtaposed with her own experience teaching writing workshops for veterans of Vietnam and other wars. Rich in empathy and moral conviction, Kingston is also such an exuberant storyteller that readers may regret that she purposely leaves the fictional narrative unfinished" (The New Yorker Magazine). That is, however, the whole point: That peace will always remain elusive. No sooner is it within our grasp that we do something to lose it again. An absolute "must-have" title for Maxine Hong Kingston collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed in pink pen-marker on the title page by Maxin Hong Kingston. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. As is her custom, Maxine Hong Kingston added her signature-chop. It comes with a rare and pristine copy of the lovely Souvenir Material of the event during which her signature was obtained. This title is a contemporary classic. This is one of few such signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A scarce signed copy thus. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for "The Woman Warrior" in 1976, the National Book Award for "China Men" in 1980, and the National Medal for the Humanities. One of the greatest American writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER MAXINE HONG KINGSTON TITLES IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 0679440755.

Seller Inventory # 6269

Bibliographic Details

• Title: THE FIFTH BOOK OF PEACE - Scarce Fine Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing With Souvenir Material: Signed by Maxine Hong Kingston - SIGNED ON THE TITLE PAGE
• Publisher: New York City, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679440755
• ISBN 13: 9780679440758
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author

About this title

Synopsis

The Fifth Book of Peace opens as Maxine Hong Kingston, driving home from her father’s funeral in the early 1990s, discovers that her neighborhood in the Oakland-Berkeley hills is engulfed in flames. Her home burns to the ground, and with it, all her earthly possessions, including her novel-in-progress. Kingston, who at the time was deeply disturbed by the Persian Gulf War, decides that she must understand her own loss of all she possessed as a kind of shadow-experience of war: a lesson about what it would be like to experience up close its utter devastation. Thus she embarks on a mission to re-create her novel from scratch, to rebuild her life, and to reach out to veterans of war and share with them her views as a lover of peace.

In the middle section of this remarkable book, Kingston reconstructs for us her lost novel, the lush and compelling story of the Chinese-American Wittman Ah Sing and his wife, Taña–California artists who flee to Hawaii to evade the draft during the Vietnam War. Wittman and Taña help to create an official Sanctuary for deserters and GIs who’ve returned devastated by their experiences in Vietnam–not unlike, as it turns out, the metaphorical sanctuary Maxine creates, back in her real world, by inviting war veterans to participate in writing workshops. As the vets share their stories, she teaches them both the value of writing–the accurate transcription of what is in the heart–and the value of community.

Paradoxically, the stories of war and its terrors become for her and the vets a literature of peace–words that enable them to achieve peace, at least within themselves. Moving among the vets with her Buddhist-inflected wisdom and at times humorous self-doubts, weaving their stories together with her own struggle to reorient herself after the fire, Maxine Hong Kingston is at times a kind of sprite, an almost weightless spirit, who guides others toward a better place, and at times a challenging teacher, who will not let us turn from the spectacle of a world so often at war.

About the Author

Maxine Hong Kingston is Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. For her memoirs and fiction, The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and Hawai’i One Summer, she has earned numerous awards, among them the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the title of “Living Treasure of Hawai’i.”