Red Star Over China By Edgar Snow

About the book:

The first Western account, by an American journalist, of the Chinese Communists. The author spent months in 1936 traveling with the Red Army and provides an account of the Long March and biographical accounts of the leaders with photographs.

About the author:

Edgar Snow was a native of Missouri who went to the Far East when he was twenty-two. Before writing Red Star Over China he made his home in China for seven years, studied the country and the language, and lectured at Yenching University. In Asia he worked for the Chicago Tribute, the New York Sun, the New York Herald Tribune and the London Daily Herald. In the post-war era he became the Saturday Evening Post's widely quoted specialist on China, India and the U.S.S.R.

What the author said about the Long March:

"Adventure, exploration, discovery, human, courage and cowardice, ecstasy and triumph, suffering, sacrifice, and loyalty, and then through it all, like a flame, an undimmed ardour and undying hope and amazing revolutionary optimism of those thousands of youths who would not admit defeat by man or nature or God or death - all this and more seemed embodied in the history of an odyssey unequalled in modern times."

"It was impossible to deny recognition of the Long March as one of the great exploits of military history. In Asia only the Mongols had surpassed it, and in the past three centuries there had been no similar armed migration of a nation with exception, perhaps, of the amazing Flight of the Torgut, of which Sven Hedin told in his Jehol, City of Emperors. Hannibal's march over the Alps looked like a holiday excursion beside it. A more interesting comparison was Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, when the Grand Army was utterly broken and demoralized."