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Wednesday, March 26, 2008

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.

3 comments:

Ingrid Paulson said...

Compare this with the original hardcover in Canada, where it was first published:

http://www.amazon.ca/Communists-Daughter-Dennis-Bock/dp/000200528X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206560222&sr=8-2

I was on a book panel where this cover got torn to shreds, and lo and behold, the designer took his or her name off it. Nice to see a better interpretation in the US.

Anonymous said...

I think this is nice. I would be interested in reading it.

Anonymous said...

The concept is great, and I really want to like this...but doesn't it look like she's hiding beneath a skirt?