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Peking Story : The Last Days of Old China
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Peking Story : The Last Days of Old China Paperback - 2003

by David Kidd

  • Used
  • very good
  • Paperback

Description

New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The, 2003. Paperback. Very Good. Disclaimer:A copy that has been read, but remains in excellent condition. Pages are intact and are not marred by notes or highlighting, but may contain a neat previous owner name. The spine remains undamaged. An ex-library book and may have standard library stamps and/or stickers.
Used - Very Good
NZ$12.41
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Details

  • Title Peking Story : The Last Days of Old China
  • Author David Kidd
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition Reprint
  • Condition Used - Very Good
  • Pages 183
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The, USA
  • Date 2003
  • Illustrated Yes
  • Features Illustrated, Table of Contents
  • Bookseller's Inventory # G1590170407I4N10
  • ISBN 9781590170403 / 1590170407
  • Weight 0.47 lbs (0.21 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.02 x 5.04 x 0.52 in (20.37 x 12.80 x 1.32 cm)
  • Themes
    • Cultural Region: Asian - Chinese
  • Library of Congress subjects Communism - China, China - Social life and customs - 1949-1976
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2003011656
  • Dewey Decimal Code 951.05

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From the publisher

David Kidd (1926–1996) was born in Corbin, Kentucky to a coal-mining community. He later grew up in Detroit, where his father became an executive in the automotive industry. In 1946, at age nineteen, Kidd made his first trip to Peking as a University of Michigan exchange student with one idea in mind: to get as far away from home as possible. He spent the next four years teaching English in the Peking suburbs. During this time, he married the daughter of a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, moving into her family’s 101-room palace, where he had a uniquely intimate view of the Communist takeover. His account of his experiences was serialized in The New Yorker and published in book-form as All the Emperor’s Horses in 1960, later retitled Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China. He returned to the US in 1950 and taught at the Asia Institute until 1956, when he moved to Japan. There he continued to work as a lecturer, became a devoted collector of Chinese and Japanese art and antiquities, and, in 1976, founded the Oomoto School of Traditional Japanese Arts in Kyoto. He lived in Kyoto until his death of cancer at age sixty-nine.

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Media reviews

Kidd’s pieces have been a double illumination. Their intimate domestic lanterns shed light on the dark side of the moon and, exotic and informational interest aside, glow in their own skins, as art. They are simple, graceful, comic, mournful miniatures of an ominous catastrophe, the unprecedently swift death of a uniquely ancient civilization.
— John Updike

In the reader’s eye, Kidd’s story wavers between fact and fiction. It seems too good to be true, like the perfectly woven family sagas common to the great Chinese novels and Victorian fiction. But the climax, the unwritten final chapter of Peking Story, is firmly written in fact: the crumbling of an empire 4000 years old. To achieve this effect in less than 200 pages is astounding.
— Alberto Manguel

Citations

  • New York Times, 08/03/2003, Page 20

About the author

David Kidd (1926-1996) was born in Corbin, Kentucky to a coal-mining community. He later grew up in Detroit, where his father became an executive in the automotive industry. In 1946, at age nineteen, Kidd made his first trip to Peking as a University of Michigan exchange student with one idea in mind: to get as far away from home as possible. He spent the next four years teaching English in the Peking suburbs. During this time, he married the daughter of a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, moving into her family's 101-room palace, where he had a uniquely intimate view of the Communist takeover. His account of his experiences was serialized in The New Yorker and published in book-form as All the Emperor's Horses in 1960, later retitled Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China. He returned to the US in 1950 and taught at the Asia Institute until 1956, when he moved to Japan. There he continued to work as a lecturer, became a devoted collector of Chinese and Japanese art and antiquities, and, in 1976, founded the Oomoto School of Traditional Japanese Arts in Kyoto. He lived in Kyoto until his death of cancer at age sixty-nine.

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