My Nanking Home: 1918-1937 by Waller, Nancy Thomson - 2010

Cherry Valley, New York: Willow Hill Publications, 2010. Book. As New. Soft cover. Signed by Author(s). 1st Edition. First Edition. 168pp, 2 maps, color photograph on cover, 75 black and white illustrations from photographs, glossary. Tall 8vo/23 cm. Paper, as new. Signed and dated by author at Cherry Valley Art Gallery reception, June 2010. A loving memoir of this 91-year old author about growing up in Nanking, China. The author was helped by an unusually large trove of family and personal correspondence, and by many family members and friends, and has produced an exceptionally warm and affectionate work about those years, including some memories of their neighbor and her mother's close friend, Pearl Buck. Her father, James Claude Thomson, was head of the Chemistry department and later a Dean of the University of Nanking, a Christian institution.supported by American churches Her brother, the late Professor James C. Thomson, Jr. was a highly placed administrator in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, later head of the Nieman Fellows progrram at Harvard and finally professor of International Relations at Boston Univesity. He wrote extensively about Chinese affairs, opposing the drift toward American backing of Chiang kai-Chek and actively opposed the Vietnam War. He also worked on several films including, in 1993, a public television documentary on Pearl Buck entitled, East Wind West Wind: the Life and Times of Pearl Buck the Woman Who Embraced the World. In an obituary written about him for the American Historical Association, Prof. James Reed of the Harvard Divinity School bemoans that his friend could not follow up the repeated suggestions of his mentor, John K. Fairbank, that he write on "that fascinating subject he knew most about, his own life and times between China and America. "Though this is not a scholarly work, it is an especially loving portrait of Thomson and his family which may fill in some of the personal details that Fairbank may have alluded to..