The Man Who Stayed Behind

Rittenberg, Sidney; Bennett, Amanda

ISBN 10: 0671735950 / ISBN 13: 9780671735951

Published by Simon & Schuster, 1993

About this Item

476p. First edition. Signed with a personalized inscription by Rittenberg on title page. Text is otherwise unmarked on white pages. Binding is tight, hinges are secure. Red paper boards with blue cloth spine and gilt lettering are clean and pointed. Jacket is unclipped and glossy with minor edge wear. Seller Inventory # 99988

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Man Who Stayed Behind

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Publication Date: 1993

Binding: 8vo Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: Signed.

About this title

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.

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