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Outstanding
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Booklist Donna Seaman
Ha Jin's taut drama of war, incarceration, coercion, and survival is galvanizing, and his ardently observant narrator is heroic in his grappling with the paradox of humankind's savagery and hunger for the divine. [Aug 2004, p.1872]
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Another brilliant installment in Ha Jin's history of modern China ("The Crazed," 2002, etc.), written with his usual understatement and clarity.
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Outstanding
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Library Journal Shirley N. Quan
Yuan's gritty yet gripping tale forces readers to contemplate the horrors of a past war from a different perspective. This is the author's strongest storytelling effort to date. [Aug 2004, p.67]
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Outstanding
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Los Angeles Times Linda Jaivin
Startlingly seductive...both a work of profound humanism and devastating nihilism.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
The force of this story, painted with starkly melancholy longing, pulls the reader inexorably along.
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Outstanding
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Annabel Lyon
The novel has an eerie, deadpan quality that gives the most horrific violence the immediacy of news footage.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Russel Banks
Powerfully moving...It's a brilliant and original enjambment, and Ha Jin pulls it off with mastery; the result is that his narrator, Yu Yuan, is one of the most fully realized characters to emerge from the fictional world in years.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Charles McCarry
A powerful work of the imagination whose psychic territory is not the hunger and humiliation of the prison camp but the haunted past that was the old, lost China and the mysterious future that is in the process of becoming Mao Zedong's chimerical new China.
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Favorable
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Houston Chronicle John Freeman
Jin does not wish to entertain but to inform and put his readers in a place where most of us would choose not to linger. He has certainly accomplished that goal here. Readers are likely to finish War Trash feeling like they, too, have escaped this terrible camp.
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Favorable
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New York Review Of Books Ian Buruma
This book is not simply a treatise on Chinese politics and society, but a fine novel on the human condition.
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Favorable
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Chicago Sun-Times Roger K. Miller
Its plain, straightforward test may be somewhat fitting to a memoir, but it occasionally can be less than gripping to read. Nevertheless, the story overcomes the solemn simplicity with which it is told.
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Favorable
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Christian Science Monitor Ron Charles
Indeed, there's a muted quality to this narrative that would grow dull from a less talented writer, but here he holds our attention like a whisper. The slightly stilted, temperate tone runs all the way to the last word, and the cumulative effect is deeply moving.
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Melissa Rose Bernardo
A tough read -- the sights, sounds, and stench of war seem unshakable -- but it's both timely and touching.
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Mixed
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The Guardian Julia Lovell
As a portrait of life in the camps, and a study in the corruption and hypocrisy of modern Chinese political culture, War Trash is unfailingly powerful. But Ha Jin's fourth novel is still scattered with linguistic glitches that compromise the reading experience.
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Unfavorable
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The New Yorker
The subject is fascinating, but in execution the novel often seems burdened by voluminous research, and it strains dutifully to illustrate political truisms.
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Unfavorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Alan Cheuse
A long, tough slog of a book, giving us, rather inadvertently, I fear, a sense of what it must have been like to fight up and down those coveted pieces of territory in a world of blood, bullets and mud.
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