JOURNEY FROM THE EAST

The author of The Fight for the Pacific (Morrow-1941) has thoroughly recapitulated a life in the Orient, a retrospective evaluation which has the feel of authoritative knowledge, intimate experience in countries lived in, wide participation in events chronicled, and a vital curiosity concerning the people about whom he writes. It makes an interesting contribution to current background material on the East. The father was an expert in lumber, who had pioneered in Eastern Manchuria, nattling bandits, tigers, the plague, who had conciliated marauding soldiers and war , who helped develop the country so like our own California in gold rush days. ya was born in rim, early learned to love the Chinese, and set his aim on journalism as a career. From Harbin to One-faced Slope, Vladivostok and Shanghai, catching on schooling, experiencing civil wars, the origins of Soviet education and living, playing a small part in the Chinese Socialist Revolution, watching Chiang Kai-shek fifth column his way to leadership. Then California and Pomona College, school for journalism at Columbia, and back to Shanghai as Eastern correspondent for the Washington Post, where he worked for Japanese news agencies, and observed and exposed Japan on the march. We worked next for the China Press, under close Japanese surveillance...Filled with stories of leaders and the little men of the people; a chronicle of incidents of the past and current years. Not just a war book.