The Crazed, Ha Jin
The Crazed, Ha Jin
List: $25.99 | Sale: $18.20
Club: $12.99

The Crazed

Author: Ha Jin

Narrator: Norm Lee

Unabridged: 9 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 10/29/2010

Categories: Fiction


Synopsis

Best-selling, National Book Award-winning author Ha Jin displays his impressive storytelling gifts in this rich examination of contemporary China and the civil unrest at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Professor Yang suffers a stroke and is confined to a hospital bed. Now Jian Wan, Yang's brightest student and future son-in-law, must suspend his rigorous studies to care for his mentor. Jian dutifully keeps watch as Yang begins raving madly, condemning everything while pleading with unseen tormentors.

Has Yang gone insane, or is he no longer capable of hiding painful secrets? With his own beliefs and expectations rattled, Jian begins to see the world in a much different light - just as the fateful events at Tiananmen Square begin.

The Crazed is a daring and powerful novel that puts a human face on the brutal injustice that continues to haunt China. Narrator Norm Lee expertly voices the confusion of a young man struggling to understand the world around him.

About Ha Jin

Ha Jin left his native China in 1985 to attend Brandeis University. He is the author of two books of poetry; two collections of stories, Ocean of Words, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1997, and Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1996; and In the Pond, a novel. He lives near Atlanta, where he is a professor at Emory University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by William2 on January 04, 2017

Ha Jin is subtle. He doesn't beat us over the head with an overview of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. So the non-Chinese reader can be a little lost here without that background. The best preparation I can think of is Nien Cheng's magnificent Life and Death in Shanghai. The Cultural Revolution was......more

Goodreads review by Cláudia on July 25, 2019

Este livro, o primeiro que leio de Ha Jin, foi uma agradável surpresa. É muito mais do que um livro sobre o massacre de Tiananmen, na República Popular da China, em 1989, através do qual o Partido Comunista quis calar o movimento estudantil, os intelectuais e todos os chineses descontentes. É sobre......more

Goodreads review by Tara on February 24, 2009

Ok. First of all do NOT read this book's description on Goodreads, it ruins the whole book! Also don't listen to these fools' reviews whining about this book: "its boring" "the end mystifies me" and so on. How anyone could be "mystified" by the end of this book, or could have "no idea what Ha Jin wa......more

Goodreads review by Pam on June 29, 2020

This is a slow starting book that builds powerfully. The Crazed is written by Ha Jin, an expatriate from China who has lived in the United States for some time. His book is set at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre but doesn’t involve the incident at all until very late in the book. Although......more

Goodreads review by Stephen on January 17, 2018

Staggering. Without a doubt this is Ha Jin's finest, most important novel. I was fairly stunned by the extraordinary War Trash, but this one is more cogent and obviously more personal, filled with gut-wrenching urgency, cynicism, and despair.......more