The Communist's Daughter

Designer credit to come

An obscured face is an overused design trope, but this works beautifully for this partly true, partly fictive story of Dr. Norman Bethune, a Canadian physician who, depending on whom you ask, was either a great humanitarian or a Communist (let some other blog take up the question of the extent to which one can be both).


Bethune's work in China is fact; what's invented here is a daughter he had but never knew and letters he wrote to her but were never sent. Combine this with Publishers Weekly's description of the Bethune character as "a war-weary idealist whose dreams of a better world were battered by ugly reality" and you've got a tragic lack of seeing.