BOOK REVIEW ON AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

John Maxwell Hamilton's seminal biography of Edgar Snow is an important contribution to the study of American journalists in China.

Born in Missouri in 1905, Snow graduated from the Missouri School of journalism and traveled to China, as a stowaway, to report on revolution and change, which he did with idealism and personal fervor. He was part of that group of journalists, including Theodore White, Annalee Jacoby, and Graham Peck, who were committed to a cause. He traveled to Mao Zedong's guerrilla redoubt in Yenan in 1936 and stood with Mao on the balcony of Tienanmen in 1970. Snow died on February 15, 1972,just four days before Richard Nixon left on his historic trip to China. His ashes are divided between the grounds of Beijing University and the shore of the Hudson River.

For most Americans, Snow is famous for his book Red Star over China. Snow's sympathetic and somewhat romantic introduction of the goals, history, and personalities of the Chinese Communist revolutionary army established Mao Zedong as a Chinese hero in the American press. For his efforts, Snow was at first received as a popular and insightful author. Later he was so vilified for helping to "lose China" that he felt like an Ishmael in his own country (p. 21 1). He spent the last years of his life in selfimposed exile in Switzerland.

Hamilton, in chapter 3, narrates for the first time the compelling story of how Red Star over China was written and how it was received in the United States. This excellent chapter should be read by journalists as well as by historians.
Hamilton depicts Snow as a Midwestern idealist and humanist who was sympathetic to the plight of the common man. Despite his personal commitment to the Chinese people, he was still a professional journalist who did not let his romanticism totally dictate his reporting. His objectivity and realism made him an enemy to ideologues. He was accused of being a spy in China and a fellow traveler in the United States. Because of the anti-Communist atmosphere and Snow's own apologetic attitude for the Chinese regime, his second major effort on China, The Other Side of the River, Red China Today (1962), was a public and financial disaster.

The sources for the biography are profuse and rich. Hamilton had access to Snow's papers, and he interviewed family members, journalists, historians, colleagues, and friends. He also used documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. He enhanced his work with two trips to China. His narrative, though thick with detail, is not dull or heavy.

Hamilton is fascinated with Edgar Snow'sjournalistic career and idealistic global concerns. Like Snow, Hamilton was a journalist in the United States and abroad. He has had broad international experience working with the U.S. Agency for International Development and with staffs of the House Foreign

Affairs Committee and World Bank. His doctorate is in American civilization from George Washington University.
In some ways he shares Snow's limitations: he has a lay person's knowledge of Chinese history and minimal Chinese-language skills. He did not conduct interviews in great depth. Snow complained that his editors did not provide enough maps. Hamilton, too, has inadequate map coverage. This study could be supplemented with a work more familiar with China and the problems of reporting in China: Stephen R. MacKinnon and Oris Friesen's China Reporting: An Oral Histo?y of American journalism in the 1930s and 1940s (1987).