Will the book the Corpse Walkers be a best selling book?
These are excellent oral histories/narratives of people displaced, marginalized, oppressed, eccentric, and/or forgotten in the New China. In some ways reminiscent of the best of Studs Terkel’s stuff, as many reviewers note, but the accounts seem more shaped, are certainly given more room to breathe and bump about. I think they’re most appreciated as sipping whiskey, rather than swallowed whole, and now the damn library demands it back tomorrow. Sources: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2880708.
Synopsis The Corpse Walker is a compilation of twenty-seven extraordinary oral histories that opens a window, unlike any other, onto the lives of ordinary, often outcast, Chinese men and women. Liao Yiwu (one of the best-known writers in China because he is also one of the most censored) chose his subjects from the bottom of Chinese society: people for whom the “new” China—the China of economic growth and globalization-—is no more beneficial than the old. By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy, he manages to get his subjects to talk openly about their lives. Here are a professional mourner, a trafficker in humans, a leper, an abbot, a retired government official, a former landowner, a mortician, a feng shui master, a former Red Guard, a political prisoner, a village teacher, a blind street musician, a Falun Gong practitioner, and many others–people who have been battered by life but who have managed to retain their dignity, their humor, and their essential, complex hu
