Unbound (King)

Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival
Dean King, 2010
Little, Brown & Co.
399 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316167086

Summary
In October 1934, the Chinese Communist Army found itself facing annihilation, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Nationalist soldiers. Rather than surrender, 86,000 Communists embarked on an epic flight to safety. Only thirty were women. Their trek would eventually cover 4,000 miles over 370 days.

Under enemy fire they crossed highland awamps, climbed Tibetan peaks, scrambled over chain bridges, and trudged through the sands of the western deserts. Fewer than 10,000 of them would survive, but remarkably all of the women would live to tell the tale.

Unbound is an amazing story of love, friendship, and survival written by a new master of adventure narrative. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Richmond, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina; M.A., New
   York University
• Currently—lives in Richmond, Virginia

Dean King is the author of numerous books, including Unbound: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival (2010), and the highly acclaimed biography Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed. King has also written for many publications, including Men's Journal, Esquire, Outside, New York magazine, and the New York Times. He lives in Richmond, Virginia. (From the pubisher and Wikipedia.)

More
The award winning author of ten books and dozens of stories in national magazines, Dean King has a deep and abiding passion for historical and adventure narratives. His earliest works—A Sea of Words; Harbors and High Seas; and Every Man Will Do His Duty—are companion books to Patrick O'Brian's monumental Aubry-Maturin novel series and are the first and most popular companion books to the 20-novel series.

King wrote a groundbreaking biography of O'Brian, published just three month's after O'Brian's death in Dublin—Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed (2000). King appeared in a BBC documentary about O'Brian and on ABC World News Tonight and NPR's Talk of the Nation.

King followed this biography with the national bestseller Skeletons on the Zahara (2004), which tells the true story of the shipwreck of a Connecticut merchant brig Commerce on the west coast of Africa in 1815. The crew was enslaved on the desert by nomadic Arabs and had to travel 800 miles across the Sahara to reach freedom. Based on the memoirs of Captain James Riley and sailor Archibald Robbins, which King discovered in the New York Yacht Club library, and translated into ten languages, Skeletons was a multiple book of the year selection, the basis of a feature in National Geographic Adventure and a two-hour special documentary on the History Chanel. It is currently being developed as a feature film in London.

Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival, about the 30 courageous women who walked 4,000 miles across China with Mao Zedong, in 1934, was published in 2010. While crossing eleven provinces, the 30 women forded dozens of raging rivers, scaled ice-covered peaks on the Tibetan Plateau, and survived ambushes, bombings, severe hunger and thirst, typhoid fever, and the births of half a dozen children. Their epic march helped reshape China forever. Daniel A. Metraux, professor of Asian Studies at Mary Baldwin College wrote that "Unbound is a must read for any student of modern Chinese history and ranks with Red Star Over China as one of the classic narratives of the early days of the CCP.”

In addition to his books, King is a past director of book publishing at National Review, an original contributing editor to Men's Journal, and the founder of Bubba Magazine. He has contributed stories to Book Marks, Esquire, Men's Journal, National Geographic Adventure, New York, New York Times, Outside, Travel + Leisure, and the Daily Telegraph.

An avid hiker, King likes to clear his mind on cross-country treks. He writes:

I took my first major walk—190 miles coast to coast in England—in 1986 after escaping a tedious temporary job as sales clerk in a London Tie-Rack. The job made the open air all the more glorious, even if the cloud ceiling was about head high almost every day. Ever since then, my friend, Rob, an English investment banker, and I plan walks whenever we can. Various friends sign on for these no-frills holidays. On our first journey, we followed Alf Wainwright’s route through the North York Moors (stark and lovely like the end of the world), the Yorkshire Dales (where we encountered horizontal sheets of rain), and the Lake District (lush hills with rocky tops ringing with their literary inspiration). It was so much fun, we did it again in 2000.

In between, we walked Offa’s Dyke (160 rugged and breathtaking miles along the Welsh-English border) in 1987; Pilgrim’s Way, from Winchester, once the political center of England, to Canterbury, then the ecclesiastical center of England, with my wife and a friend in 1989; and the Tour du Mont Blanc, which takes you through Switzerland, France and England, in 1993. The toughest walk we have tackled was the Walkers' Haute Route, from Zermatt to Chamonix, in 1996. Each morning began with a brutal uphill stretch. One friend finally had to take a bus and meet us ahead.

In 1987, King and his wife, Jessica King, and some friends tackled the one-day Round Manhattan Walk (about 36 miles), about which King says, “The battering of walking on the pavement all day left me sorer than the New York Marathon would a few years later.” Other favorite journeys include the Mont Ventoux midnight climb, in France, the Na Pali Coast, in Kauai, Hawaii, and a series of inn-to-inn walks that Dean did for Mid-Atlantic Country Magazine: From Back Bay, Virginia, to the Outer Banks of North Carolina along the Allegheny Trail in West Virginia"; and on the Delaware River Trail, 1994.

In 1999, Dean sailed as a sailor trainee on board the tallship HMS Rose from New York to Bermuda. And in 2001, he retraced Captain James Riley’s route on foot and on camelback through Western Sahara, which informed his book Skeletons on the Zahara.

Dean is a founder, past co-chair, and advisory board member of the James River Writers organization, which sponsors the annual James River Writers Conference in Richmond, Virginia. Held on the first weekend of October at the Library of Virginia in historic downtown Richmond, the conference is known for its relaxed and collegial atmosphere as well as for its noteable guests. (Excerpted from the author's website.)

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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

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Unbound:

1. How would you describe the condition of women—rich or poor—in China prior to the Communist revolution? Talk about the ways in which the communists changed the lives of Chinese women.

2. If you've you read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, does Lisa See's book provide a backstory for the real historical events in Unbound?

3. How did you feel about the fact that these marchers underwent bombing by Americans? What was the American position toward Mao Zedong?

4. What aspects of Long March did you find most horrific—the terrain, the weather, the constant attacks? What deprivations were hardest to read about?

5. If you had been one of the women, would you have been able to leave your newborn behind?

6. Is there one particular woman, whose story...or voice... you find more compelling than the others?

7. What roles did the women play during their march? What did you find most admirable? To what do you attribute their remarkable feat of endurance—what is the foundation of their strength?

8. Care to make a comment on the fact that by the end of the trek, all 30 women were still alive...while only 1 out of 10 men survived? Any comparisons to those of us living in the 21st century—would any among us have the commitment or strength to endure such hardship?

9. In what way does King show that the problems (suspicion and paranoia) that plagued the later Communists were already present during the 1934-35 march?

10. Talk about the terrible irony of the Cultural Revolution and how it affected the lives of these 30 women?

11. What have you learned about Chinese history that you were unaware of before reading Unbound? Have you gained a different perspective on China, its history, government, and people after having read the book?

12. Author Dean King has said that in the book he...

wants the reader to walk down the trails with these women, to witness the challenges they faced, to cross the rivers, to climb the mountains, nursing one another and nursing the men.

Does King achieve that goal? Does he bring this brutal trek alive for readers, sitting in the comfort of our armchairs?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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