At CNN in Washington, Jim Sciutto’s dimly lit office is both man cave and shrine to a foreign correspondent who has reported from more than 50 countries. A typewriter he bought on Portobello Road during a decade in London. Photos he took in Afghanistan and Ukraine. A Vietnamese newspaper account of the time he rode over the South China Sea on a US spy plane. A corked bottle of water from his trip to the North Pole in a US nuclear submarine. A fragment of the Black Hawk helicopter destroyed…
Tag: Books
Rare copy of Mao’s Little Red Book expected to fetch more than £30,000
The Little Red Book, a talisman of 20th-century Maoism, may have fallen out of favour in China after the Cultural Revolution, but its popularity with collectors shows no sign of abating. The book, officially entitled Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, was given its popular name due to the bright red cover of mass-produced editions. A rare prototype version is about to resurface in a sale by a west London auction house of hundreds of artefacts from the Cultural Revolution, where it is expected to fetch more than £30,000. The early…
Science fiction awards held in China under fire for excluding authors
A prestigious literary award for science fiction, which was hosted in China for the first time, has come under fire for excluding several authors from the 2023 awards, raising concerns about interference or censorship in the awards process. The New York Times bestseller Babel by RF Kuang, an episode of the Netflix drama The Sandman and the author Xiran Jay Zhao were among the works and authors excluded from the 2023 Hugo awards, which were administered by the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in Chengdu in October. Babel, which won…
‘Cheaper to save the world than destroy it’: why capitalism is going green
The root of the climate crisis is “not capitalism but the corruption of capitalism”, according to the author of a new book on how people, policy and technology are working to stop the planet from heating. Akshat Rathi, a climate reporter with financial news outlet Bloomberg, argues that smart policies can harness capitalism to cut carbon pollution without killing markets or competition. “It is now cheaper to save the world than destroy it,” he writes, adding that this holds true even when viewed through a narrow capitalist lens. “Capitalism cannot…
Why no concern at prisoners being paid just 50p an hour to work? | Brief letters
Reading another article about Chinese prisoners possibly making products for sale in the UK (Chinese prisoner’s ID card apparently found in lining of Regatta coat, 1 December), I wonder why there is no concern that British prisoners are forced to work for UK companies for about 50p an hour? This work provides no training for release and serves only to enrich private prison contractors.David AdamsDarlington, County Durham How appropriate that on the day you note that Katherine Rundell, the author of The Golden Mole, has won the Waterstones book award…
Tania Branigan’s Red Memory wins 2023 Cundill history prize
Guardian leader writer Tania Branigan has won the 2023 Cundill history prize for her book Red Memory, about the ongoing trauma of China’s Cultural Revolution told through the rarely heard stories of the people who lived through it. Branigan will receive $75,000 (£60,984) as part of the award, which is the largest cash prize for a book of nonfiction in English. She was announced as the winner at a ceremony in Montreal on Wednesday evening. Judging chair and historian Philippa Levine said that Branigan’s “sensitive study of the impact of…
Sparks by Ian Johnson review – China’s underground historians
Those looking for horrors in China’s recent past have no shortage of examples to choose from: the 1967 massacre of more than 9,000 people by Communist party cadres in Dao County, who threw the bodies of “class enemies” into a river to decompose; the starvation and cannibalismof thousands of prisoners at Jiabiangou, a labour camp in Gansu, in the late 1950s. For many, however, the struggle is being allowed to remember that such events happened at all. Memory is a compelling and slippery topic for students of China. Books such…
Imprisoned Uyghur academic named 2023 PEN international writer of courage
Leading Uyghur professor Rahile Dawut has been named this year’s international writer of courage. Having been missing for six years, last month Dawut was reportedly sentenced to life in prison by Chinese authorities on charges of endangering state security. Dawut was picked by Michael Rosen who, as winner of the PEN Pinter prize, shares the award with a writer of courage, selected from a shortlist of international writers who have actively defended freedom of expression, often at risk to their own safety. Rosen chose Dawut, a global expert on Uyghur…
Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms review – immortals and armies wreak havoc
“Strange things keep happening these days,” muses Jiang Ziya (Bo Huang) halfway through this extravagant adaptation of Xu Zhonglin’s 16th-century myth-and-fantasy novel Investiture of the Gods. By this point, we’ve already seen a woman kill herself with a hatpin before being possessed by the spirit of a white fox; a gurgling, pistachio-coloured demon baby is found naked in the woods; and a conjuror who can make his head float free of his body when threatened with decapitation. Strange days indeed. Ziya is one of three immortals sent to arrest the…
Isabel Crook obituary
The pioneering anthropologist Isabel Crook, who has died aged 107, was the last survivor of that generation of sympathetic westerners who joined Mao Zedong’s rural revolution and stayed on after 1949 to build a “new China” – with mixed fortunes. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) her husband David Crook was accused of spying and imprisoned for five years, while Isabel was locked up for three years on their college campus. The couple retained their belief in the post-Mao leadership of the Communist party until, horrified by the Beijing massacre in…