Sand Against the Wind; Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45

London: Papermac, 1991. First U.K.? Edition. Trade paperback. Very good. Format is approximately 5.5 inches by 8.5 inches. xv, [3], 621, [1] pages. Footnotes. Maps. Appendix. Bibliography. Notes. Index. Name and date in ink inside the front cover. Previous owner's embossed stamp of fep. Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (1912 - 1989) was an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August, a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China, a biography of General Joseph Stilwell. During World War II, Tuchman worked in the Office of War Information. Tuchman favored a literary approach to writing history, providing eloquent explanatory narratives rather than concentration upon discovery and publication of fresh archival sources. In 1978, Tuchman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She became the first female president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1979. She won a National Book Award in History. Derived from a Kirkus review: With accustomed adroitness Tuchman meshes details political and personal, major and minor, into a strong narrative of General Stilwell's career and thirty-five years of U.S. China policy. Stilwell was an egalitarian, commonsensical, high-humored officer; his hatred of pretense and incumbent loneliness are captured in particular through selections from his literate diaries. As staff officer to the American occupation force in Shanghai, but especially as intelligence officer from 1934 to 1940, Vinegar Joe is at his exuberant best. But Stilwell's orientation was toward tactical military situations, rather than the international political climate. She is descriptive of the 1942-1945 high points of Stilwell's career, as he tries to make the Chinese army capable of stopping the Japanese. Stilwell is afforded only meager logistical support from U.S. air and ground forces, denied enough political support to arm-twist Chiang, burdened with British shirking, and then ignominiously canned.