Pearl Buck in China (Spurling)

Book Reviews
Penetrating.... Ms. Spurling’s book isn’t a full-dress biography. (For that, there’s Peter Conn’s sturdy Pearl S. Buck: a Cultural Biography, published in 1996.) It focuses instead on Buck’s first four decades, her formative years as a woman and as a writer. It’s a good story, easily as curious as any Buck herself put to paper. Ms. Spurling writes well, and with real feeling.... The resulting portrait is a complicated one, but it has an absorbing glow.... It's a good story, easily as curious as any Buck herself put to paper.
Dwight Garner - New York Times Book Review


This elegant, richly researched work is at once a portrait of a remarkable woman ahead of her time, an evocation of China between the wars, and a meditation on how the secrets and griefs of childhood can shape a writer…Spurling's biography is a compelling tribute to the woman who first focused American attention on [China].
Leslie T. Chang - Washington Post 


Pearl Buck in China is one of those exceedingly rare biographies where the reader senses the most powerful connection between author and subject, enabling remarkably sensitive understanding and insight.
San Francisco Chronicle


From its wonderful opening sentence to its poignant close, this is a superb biography. Spurling has brought her characters to robust life. Readers will learn what they need to know about China in that tumultuous time and place at the beginning of the 20th century.
Peter Conn - Professor, University of Pennsylvania


(Starred review.) Weaving a colorful tapestry of Pearl Buck's life (1892–1973) with strands of Chinese history and literature, Spurling, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize for Matisse the Master—vividly correlates Buck's experiences of China's turbulent times to her novels. Growing up in a missionary family in China, Buck lived through the upheavals of the Boxer Rebellion and China's civil war, two marriages, and a daughter with a degenerative disease; her closeup view of the horrors of China's extreme rural poverty made her an American literary celebrity as well as a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize winner when she enshrined her observations of China in the Good Earth trilogy. Back in the United States, having opened America's eyes to China, Buck worked to repeal America's discriminatory laws against the Chinese and established an adoption agency for minority and mixed race children. For her support of racial equality, Buck was blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer even as her books were banned in Communist China for spreading reactionary, imperialist lies; Spurling'sfast-paced and compassionate portrait of a writer who described the truth before her eyes without ideological bias, whose personal life was as tumultuous as the times she lived in, will grip readers who, unlike Spurling, didn't grow up reading Buck's work.
Publishers Weekly


[C]ritics reading Pearl Buck in Chinamostly used their articles as occasions to celebrate the subject rather than the biography.... Still, if reviewers were not effusive in their praise, they had few complaints about Spurling's book and clearly admired her thorough research and elegant prose. 
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