Word: fairbanks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...FAIRBANK CAREFULLY describes the circle of China hands which emerged in the first half of this century. Portraits of Owen Lattimore. Agnes Smedley. Harold Isaacs and other key members of the Western experience in China preceding Mao consume much of Chinabound, shedding light on the personalities and politics of those who communicated what they saw or thought they saw. He chronicles the Harvard Faculty and History department with equal enthusiasm. While he fails to mention the awe his colleagues surely felt toward him and his Herculean creation of East Asian history courses which would eventually multiply and spread. Fairbank exudes...
Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir is at once a glorious success story and a seeming fairy tale From a humble Midwestern south in Sioux Falls, N.D., Fairbank soared through stints at Exeter. Wisconsin Harvard and Oxford, breezing academics and keeping a quirky sort of perspective on his meteoric intellectual development. I broke the cadence and entered Wisconsin instead of Harvard. This was partly because coeducation appealed to me. I knew how to study. What else was there...
...Fairbank momentous academic success gelled quickly into distinguished scholarship in a field few academics were paying attention to--China. Despite the monumental task of pioneering such a career. Fairbank maintained his wry and understated demeanor. He writes. "How do you get started in a field that doesn't exist. The answer is of course, that the field is there all the time, you have only to recognize and proclaim its existence...
Descriptions on Fairbank's stations in life appropriately dominate Chinabound providing wonderful insights into his development of the East Asian studies program at Harvard. But watching Fairbank's career untold, one is led to feel that this man has more going for him than brilliance. He's got good luck and charisma-the kind seen perhaps once in a billion times. He had the good professional fortune of being in China as information coordinator of the U.S. during the storms 1940s...
...oriental serutability" of "Ed Reischauer," the six-week bike ride before the first visit to China, encounters with Chou En-Lai, and rounding up Chinese journalists at their homes by jeep for a Douglas Mac Arthur press conference which was suddenly rescheduled. But it's also much more. Fairbank infuses his personal tales with the kind of clairvoyance which has distinguished him as a compassionate commentator as well as pioneer historian. With his first-hand familiarity with the U.S. effort to aid Chiang Kai-shek's regime, he describes his concern for increasingly confused decision-making in Washington...