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Title: Gang of One

Subtitle: Memoirs of a Red Guard

Author: Fan Shen

Narrator: Kirk Winkler

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 56 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-20-17

Publisher: University Press Audiobooks

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Personal Memoirs

Publisher's Summary:

In 1966 12-year-old Fan Shen, a newly minted Red Guard, plunged happily into China's Cultural Revolution. Disillusionment soon followed, then turned to disgust and fear when Shen discovered that his compatriots had tortured and murdered a doctor whose house he'd helped raid and whose beautiful daughter he secretly adored. A story of coming of age in the midst of monumental historical upheaval, Shen's Gang of One is more than a memoir of one young man's harrowing experience during a time of terror. It is also, in spite of circumstances of remarkable grimness and injustice, an unlikely picaresque tale of adventure full of courage, cunning, wit, tenacity, resourcefulness, and sheer luck - the story of how Shen managed to scheme his way through a hugely oppressive system and emerge triumphant.

Gang of One recounts how Shen escaped, again and again, from his appointed fate. His secret self-education took him from the factory to college, where friendship with an American teacher earned him the wrath of the secret police. Following a path strewn with perils and pitfalls, twists and surprises worthy of Dickens, Shen's story is ultimately an exuberant human comedy unlike any other.

Critic Reviews:

"Anyone wishing to be the architect of his or her own fortune would do well to study this amazing memoir, a testament to the human spirit." (ForeWord)

"A compulsively readable memoir....Shen's wry, anecdotal storytelling style spurs one on, as does the desire to see him through to his eventual triumph." (Booklist)

"A book of stunning power...a high literary achievement, documenting an even greater achievement...the life of this awe-inspiring man, Fan Shen." (National Review)

Members Reviews:

A Chinese Horatio Alger

This memoir is simply great story telling, a Chinese Horatio Alger tale where pluck and luck win out in the end. (Shen admits his admiration for Stendal's The Red and the Black and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, but it would be ungracious to push the analogies too closely.) For some reason Chinese culture permits a more casual, even humorous, treatment of the inhumanity and stupidity of the man-centered ideological system profiled here. If Shen's memoir doesn't have the moral weight of say, something by Solzhenitsyn, it's at least more enjoyable reading. Hats off to Shen, who (like Jacob Riis at the beginning of the twentieth century) can write so vigorously in a second language!

This book was a fun and interesting read

This book was a fun and interesting read. I also learned a lot about the Chinese cultural revolution which was really eye opening for me. I recommend it!

he's amazing.

Fan Shen was my English Comp teacher in college, he's amazing.

Please Read This Book

So many people have no idea what really happened in China during the Cultural Revolution. This book will blow your mind. Read it.

Gang of One

This book is a good read and also provides valuable insight into the Cultural Revolution in China, its participants and its victims. Though I cannot be certain that this is an actual autobiography, it definitely describes real scenes of life in China, the way a young person learned to cope with it, and thereby escape from it.