East Wind West Wind

"She could rub just about anyone the wrong way" says James Michener of Nobel and Pulitzer prize winning author Pearl S. Buck, and includes himself among the list of adversely massaged. Yet, like many of his contemporaries, Michener shares an undiluted admiration for one of the 20th century's most outspoken writers--a woman who spent as much time campaigning for social reforms as she did penning stories. Through interviews with family and friends, filmmaker Craig Davidson traces Buck's life: born in West Virginia in 1892, she would spend most of her childhood and early adulthood with her missionary parents in rural China (here she would write the bestselling and critically acclaimed The Good Earth). Returning to the U.S in the early 1930s, Buck would create the first of many scandals by parting with her husband Lossing Buck by mutual decision. Angered by some of the stinging reviews she received, Buck wrote a series of history books under the pseudonym John Sedges which were better received (a sign, Buck felt, of discrimination against women writers). Partially bearing her out was the uproar over her choice as the Nobel Prize winner for 1938, an honor which led the petulant loser Theodore Dreisser to break all communications with Buck. With international celebrity, a flush bank account, no small amount of personal power, and a loving relationship with her publisher Richard Walsh, Buck would turn her attention to other matters: forming the East-West Association for the promotion of goodwill between the pair, working hard for civil rights and becoming a champion for the NAACP, and creating the Pearl Buck Foundation which has helped thousands of orphaned children. Although Buck only had one child herself (who was mentally retarded), she would adopt several children, many from mixed races. In fact, along with Michener and Oscar Hammerstein she would expose the heinous practice of orphanages who would send American-Asian children to insane asylums rather than try to find them homes. Filled with film clips of China earlier in the century, scenes from The Good Earth, and home movies of Buck, East Wind West Wind is an intriguing portrait of a great writer who also was a trailblazer in women's rights, civil rights, and humane treatment of children. Highly recommended. (R. Pitman)