Surviving the Hurricane

At a time when the new freedoms of the post-Mao years are in jeopardy, many issues of intense concern to Chinese can freely be discussed only abroad. Of these, among the most important is the Cultural Revolution, about which Nien Cheng has written one of the best books yet to appear. Life and Death in Shanghai is a clearsighted and moving account by a cosmopolitan Shanghai woman now in her seventies who left China in 1980 and has since lived in Washington.