Word: excerpts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...perspective through the recollections of noteworthy figures who influence the events we report. Among the authors whose chronicles have appeared in these pages: Anwar Sadat, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Alexander Haig and Dissident Elena Bonner, the wife of Physicist Andrei Sakharov. This week TIME's cover story, a lengthy excerpt from Chinese Author Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai, is a memoir of a very different kind. History will record not that the author shaped large events but that she simply survived to write a gripping personal account of her imprisonment between 1966 and 1973, during China...
Senior Writer Otto Friedrich pared the 544-page book down to 14,000 words for the excerpt. He met Cheng, who lives in Washington, for the first time this past March. "Her refusal to confess is absolutely extraordinary," says Friedrich. "As I spoke to her over lunch that day, I thought to myself, 'Would I have signed? Would I have given in, to spare myself the pain?' I looked across the table and knew that...
Other questions seem downright strange. The most bizarre reads: "What do you feel is the most essential quality for a fictional character to possess in order to establish contact with an audience?" Alarmed to discover that final exams are not over, I muddle through the form, read through the excerpt from the play, and anxiously await my turn...
This week's project was directed, as were TIME's previous excerpts from books by Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Alexander Haig, Theodore H. White and Soviet Defector Arkady Shevchenko, by Executive Editor Ronald Kriss. "Before we choose a book to excerpt," says Kriss, "we always ask: Does it enlarge our knowledge of history; does it give us new insight into the way our world works?" Bonner's book combines both deeply personal and broadly historical elements. Says Kriss: "It is a story of two people living in terrible isolation, but also waging a heroic fight against a vast and monolithic...
Toward the end of the book, Bonner says of the isolation in Gorky: "From there you can't call out, you can't shout loud enough to be heard." The following excerpt shows that, given a voice of sufficient strength and conviction, yes, you can call out, you can indeed be heard...