Becoming Madame Mao
by Anchee Min
- Used
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Near Fine in Very Good dust jacket
- ISBN 10
- 0618004076
- ISBN 13
- 9780618004072
- Seller
-
Harwinton, Connecticut, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Synopsis
In a sweeping, erotically charged story that moves gracefully from the intimately personal to the great stage of world history, Anchee Min renders a powerful tale of passion, betrayal, and survival and creates a finely nuanced and always ambiguous portrait of one of the most fascinating, and vilified, women of the twentieth century. Madame Mao is almost universally known as the "white-boned demon" -- ambitious, vindictive, and cruel -- whose bid to succeed her husband led to the death of millions. But Min's story begins with a young girl named Yunhe, the unwanted daughter of a concubine who ignored her mother's pleas and refused to have her feet bound. It was the first act of rebellion for this headstrong, beautiful, and charismatic girl. She later fled the miseries of her family life, first to a provincial opera troupe, then to Shanghai and fame as an actress, and finally to the arid, mountainous regions of Yenan, where she fell in love with and married Mao Zedong. The great revolutionary leader proved to be an inattentive husband with a voracious appetite for infidelity, but the couple stayed together through the Communist victory, the disastrous Great Leap Forward, and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Min uses the facts of history and her lush, penetrating psychological imagination to take us beyond the myth of the person who so greatly influenced an entire generation of Chinese. The result is a complex portrait of a woman who railed against the confines of her culture, whose deep-seated insecurities propelled her to reinvent herself constantly, and whose ambition was matched only by her ferocious, never-to-be-fulfilled need to be loved. A daring narrative with all the compressed drama and high lyrical poetry of great opera, BECOMING MADAME MAO is the most ambitious and provocative work of Anchee Min's career.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Lavender Path Antiques and Books (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 7683
- Title
- Becoming Madame Mao
- Author
- Anchee Min
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Near Fine in Very Good dust jacket
- Edition
- First Edition; First Printing
- ISBN 10
- 0618004076
- ISBN 13
- 9780618004072
- Publisher
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Place of Publication
- Boston
- Date Published
- 2000
- Keywords
- 0618004076, Fiction - Chinese Culture, CHINA - History - 20th Century, CHINA - Women -culture, CHINA - Mao Zedong
- Bookseller catalogs
- Fiction;
Terms of Sale
Lavender Path Antiques and Books
All major credit cards accepted. Paypal accepted. Returns must be made within 30 days of purchase.
About the Seller
Lavender Path Antiques and Books
About Lavender Path Antiques and Books
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- Spine
- The outer portion of a book which covers the actual binding. The spine usually faces outward when a book is placed on a shelf....
- Fine
- A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...