BITTER WINDS: A Memoir of My Years...

BITTER WINDS: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag by Harry Wu and Carolyn Wakeman (John Wiley & Sons: $14.95; 290 pp., illustrated). An exceptional scholar and athlete, Harry Wu was eager to work for his country. But his “politically questionable” background (his father was a prosperous Shanghai banker) outweighed his skill as a geologist. In 1960, Wu was arrested on trumped-up charges: He spent the next 19 years in prison camps, enduring grueling forced labor, torture and near-starvation rations. Wu’s remarkably dispassionate account of his suffering reveals one of the bitter ironies of modern Chinese history: The pursuit of chimerical goals and enemies--from the Great Leap Forward to the campaign against the “Four Olds”--led the Chinese government to squander the lives and talents of many of the nation’s most promising young men and women.