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CHINA
Massacre in Shansi. By NAT BRANDT. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1994. xxii, 336 pp. $34.95
The presentation of history can be as undramatic as data in a spreadsheet or as intense as eyewitness accounts of actual events. Nat Brandt is an award-winning popular historian with a nose for human drama and the ability to tell a good tale. Although primarily a writer of American history, Brandt has chosen to write about the experience of Western missionaries in China at a time of great upheaval and tragedy.
Massacre in Shansi is the story of eighteen Western, mostly American, missionary families during the Boxer uprising. The drama of the story derives not so much from the tragic end of these missionaries-for in Shanxi there was no way out-as from their unbearable oscillation between hope and despair. Brandt relies heavily on the writings of the missionaries themselves to document the unfolding tragedy. Indeed, Massacre in Shansi is well documented from published and archival materials, most notably from the archival materials at Oberlin College (fifteen of Brandt's subjects were, in one way or another, linked to "Oberlin in China").
Brandt provides considerable background information on the Shanxi missionaries and certainly enough information to convince most...