Colours Of The Mountain

Nov 8, 2024 3:34 AM

Author:Da Chen

A unique modern memoir of growing up in rural China, Colours of the Mountain is a powerful and moving story of supreme determination and extraordinary faith against the most impossible odds. Da Chen was born in 1962 in a town over 50 hours' train journey from Beijing. Persecuted because of his family's landlord status, Da was an easy target for the farmer-teachers and bullying peasant boys. Whilst his older brother and sisters were forced to work in the fields, Da tired of the chaotic schooling of the Cultural Revolution and found solace with a band of good-time thugs. Following the death of Mao, an academic meritocracy was reintroduced. Da determined to escape Ch'ing Mountain, where he ran around barefoot and there was no electricity and no future. Together with his brother Jin, who had been working the land since boyhood, he began to study day and night. His determination is staggering and inspiring. In 1978, at the age of sixteen, Da Chen took a bus and a train for the first time in his life and travelled to Beijing, to the best English language institute in China. A book about friendships, prejudice, familial love and academic striving, and of one man's escape from hunger, poverty and ignorance, Colours of the Mountain is an inspiring and eloquently recounted memoir.

Reviews

If there is one book that captures the Vietnam War in the sheer Homeric scale of its passion and folly, this book is it... A dazzling montage: vividly written and deeply felt... The dramatic scenes of lonely men locked on combat...the clash of wills and egos...all these combine in a work that captures the Vietnam War like no other... An impressive achievement

—— New York Times Book Review

I have never read such a book and never expected to... It's not just about John Paul Vann. Not just about America and all of us. Not just Vietnam and all the Vietnamese. It is tragedy and comedy and I don't care how many pages it is. I'll never tire of reading it again and again

—— Harrison E. Salisbury

It will stand as the definitive account of the passions, loyalties (guided and not), inspirations, follies and tragedies of the Vietnam War

—— Sunday Times

Probably the book on the Vietnam War...sophisticated, humane. It contains some of the best military reporting ever written

—— Francis Fitzgerald

James is, quite simply, the outstanding West Indian of the twentieth century.

—— Caryl Phillips

A starting point and an intellectual inspiration ... a classic of masterly historical writing.

—— James Walvin

James is not afraid to touch his pen with the flame of ardent personal feeling - a sense of justice, love of freedom, admiration for heroism, hatred for tyranny - and his detailed, richly documented and dramatically written book holds a deep and lasting interest.

—— New York Times

Revolutionarily, the book abandoned the old narrative of black victimhood in favour of accenting the agency of the formerly enslaved who, fuelled by a desire for liberty, fought to achieve autonomy.

—— Colin Grant , Prospect

The standard and the main text through which the Haitian revolution is studied ... a book I've read back to back many times ... An incredibly brilliant book, an undeniably magnificent contribution to scholarship.

—— Akala's Great Reads

Reading and rereading The Black Jacobins, I am struck by its incredible wit and humanity, and James' determination to write a history of slavery in the Caribbean in which people of African descent appear as thinking, feeling human agents - in other words, as the protagonists of their own history and not background characters in an essentially European story.

—— Dr Liam J. Liburd, Assistant Professor of Black British History, Durham University

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