China, etc.

The niece of Pearl S. Buck went to my high school for a while in the 1950s and I read The Good Earth during my junior year. FYI: I am not a Sinophile, a China scholar, nor do I have Sinophobia.

Reading Bill Lascher’s Eve of a Hundred Midnights, James Bradley’s The China Mirage Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby’s Thunder out of China, and Ilona Ralf Sues’ Shark’s Fins and Millet gave me better insight to why China and our relationship with it is the way it is today. I also learned more about the political, economic, and social environments that set up The Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War.
Reviews of these books is not my reason for this post. Except for Shark’s Fins and Milletthere are multiple reviews on line, so I want to say what about each author makes them valid.

Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth is fiction, but she grew up in China with her missionary parents.

Ted White and Annalee Jacoby were war correspondents with access to leaders of all factions in the region. Annalee’s husband Melville (Mel) a Time-Life magazine war correspondent was killed accompanying General Harold H. George on a trip to inspect air bases.

Ilona Sues had personal contacts with leaders of all factions and commoners in China during the 1930s while on a League of Nations mission to help eradicate the flow of opium. She had intimate knowledge about meals of shark’s fins and millet and the societies who had those meals.

Bill Lasher had an advantage many writers do not —Mel and Annalee’s personal papers, films, and documents saved by their families to work with for Eve of a Hundred Midnights.

James Bradly, a historian, cited over 400 verifiable references for his work on The China Mirage.

The overlapping content of each book verifies the fidelity of the others and the experience or research by the authors added to my learning experience.