Grass Soup

Zhang Xianliang, one of China's greatest living writers, spent twenty-two years in Chinese prisons and labor camps until his "rehabilitation" in 1979. Through most of those years he kept a diary of his experiences. Because any detail would have meant the diary's destruction and Zhang's execution, the entries were curt and cryptic; sometimes entire days were condensed into two or three words. This is a frightening portrait of how a major civilization can bring itself to its knees by mass complicity, told with a deft matter-of-factness that only highlights the horror.