Long March Diary: China Epic

The wife of exNew York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury (The 900 Days, etc.) considers herself ""not a writer.'' Yet Charlotte Salisbury has previously written excellent ``diaries'' (on China, Russia, Tibet and Asia). In a companion volume to her husband's recent The Long March, she exercises, with often keen insight, a gift for the small human detail that frequently evokes a whole nation of people in delineating a transient scene or character. Salisbury and her husband left Beijing in March 1984 to make a 70-day journey, mostly by minibus, that retraced Mao's epic Long March of 19341935 with his desperately retreating Red Army. The Salisburys took in many remote parts of the country, from the dangerous Grasslands and the stark Tibetan mountains to the caves of Yan'an in the far northwest, where Mao and his exhausted Red Armyreduced from 80,000 to a relative handfulstayed until World War II. Salisbury's impressions and thumbnail sketches of now-aged and honored Long March survivors living in obscure villages are moving reminders of the heroism and tragedyand the historic necessityof China's revolution. February 17