Chasing the Dragon: A Veteran Journalist's Firsthand Account of the 1949 Chinese Revolution

Despite an intriguing premise and a unique perspective, this first-person narrative about the fall of Nationalist China and the rise of Chairman Mao Zedong will be of interest primarily to newspaper hounds and journalism majors. Rowan (First Dogs, etc.), a young Dartmouth graduate and aspiring reporter in the 1940s, initially went to China to satisfy""an innate desire for adventure"" and find""exciting stories to write about as a freelance journalist."" As an aid worker with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), he traveled through the Chinese countryside helping to distribute food and clothing to villagers, experiences he describes in great--at times exhausting--detail. The pace of the book picks up considerably, however, when Rowan meets Bill Gray, then Shanghai bureau chief for Time and Life magazines, and begins his career as a foreign correspondent. Passages about then editor-in-chief Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, prove fascinating, particularly for those interested in media. The enigmatic Henry, for instance, instructed elevator operators in the Time-Life Building in New York City to close the door right behind him,""whisking him on a solo ride up to his thirty-third floor office so that he wasn't trapped into making small talk, which he hated."" Rowan also does an adequate job of chronicling significant events in modern Chinese history--the resignation of Chiang Kai-shek, for example, and his departure to Taiwan, the emergence of Mao Zedong and the enactment of his economic policies. But Rowan's real focus is on the making of his own career (which eventually led him to presidency of the Overseas Press Club), rather than on the human dramas of the Chinese people.