Unbound (King)

Book Reviews
Unbound recounts the amazing journey that 30 women and 86,000 men took in an effort to escape Chaing Kai-shek's advancing soldiers...Threading the narratives of the women's individual stories, women's place in China at the time, and the progress of the March with an overall picture of modern Chinese history, King gives readers a unique look at a turning point for [China].
Olivia Flores Alvarez - Houston Press

Dean King's book is deeply researched, drawing from first-person accounts of survivors, Chinese historians and a range of historical scholarship, much of it never before translated into English...Never idealizing the story of the soldiers, Unbound renders, with thrilling precision, their fear and uncertainty.
Nora Nahid Khan - New Haven Advocate

Fascinating.... King, the best-selling author of Skeletons on the Zahara, has done brilliant work bringing the march to life with a plethora of vivid, well-researched details.... Unbound is an authoritative account of the Long March, but its evocations of the marchers' experiences will linger long after the historical details slip from readers' memories.
Doug Childers - Richmond Times-Dispatch

China has always been a mysterious and secretive empire, but Unbound peels back the curtain to reveal a story of strength and survival.
John T. Slania - Bookpage

In 1934, following threats by the Chinese Nationalists to destroy their village in remote southeastern China, 30 women fled with Mao Tse-tung’s Red Army.... King spent five years retracing their trek and interviewing survivors and historians to offer a very human account of an event that has loomed large in Chinese history. —Vanessa Bush
Booklist

King (Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival), a prolific writer of adventure and exploration stories, here transports readers to Mao Zedong's 1934–35 Long March, a trek to escape Chiang Kai-shek's superior forces. The arduous but successful march is a heroic founding myth of the People's Republic of China, perhaps comparable with Washington at Valley Forge. Some have recently challenged its truth, but most scholars accept the basic story even while doubting parts. There are many books on the subject, but King focuses on the women marchers (several other books have done the same, however). King uses English-language scholarship, translations by research assistants, interviews, and his own travels along the route to tell lively stories, but since there were comparatively few of these women, the narrative strains and jumps back and forth between their individual stories, women in China, the progress of the march, and the big picture of modern Chinese history. Verdict: This energetic book will appeal most to readers with less initial knowledge of China. —Charles Hayford, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL
Library Journal

Journalist King (Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival, 2004) follows the 30 remarkable women who endured the Red Army's legendary Long March. The word "unbound" in the title reflects the radical communist message espoused by early leaders like Mao Zedong that women long suppressed in Chinese society—their feet broken and bound, married off as children, reduced to lives as chattel and servants—had important roles as soldiers and reformers in the new revolutionary movement. The Communists effectively infiltrated the peasant villages with their message, and girls leaped at the chance to flee their blunted status. When Mao masterminded the movement of the hugely unwieldy 86,000-man guerrilla army from its encirclement by the Nationalists in Jiangxi in October 1934, 30 of the strongest women—some teenagers—were selected to accompany the men. Their job was largely to care for the convalescents in the mobile hospital unit. King traces their yearlong trek from Ruijin, across southwestern China, then northward, within the First Army, which was headed by Mao and later splintered into other units such as the Fourth Army, headed by the renegade Zhang Guotao. Eventually the armies converged in Sichuan in June 1935. After nearly 4,000 miles, decimated by disease, lack of adequate food, exposure and attrition, many of the group perished. Some of the women had to give birth along the way, then abandon their children to peasant families. The terrain was unbelievably harsh, and they faced Nationalist and Tibetan skirmishes along the way. King pursues the sad irony of these women's fates through the Cultural Revolution, when many of the early heroines—whom he depicts in photos and mini-biographies—were persecuted and destroyed. A terrific feminist story and a significant document of this incredible human feat.
Kirkus Reviews