Word: dragons
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...might seem more interesting at first. Mythical Beasts Coloring Book contains drawings of monsters, always a popular subject for the pre-pre-pubescent set. The author seems knowledgable about his subject; perhaps he's even spent one too many years researching mythical beasts, judging from his text concerning the dragon-like "Wyvern." "To see one," he says earnestly, "is a frightful experience...
...confirmed for years. The unrepentant Chinese government is still much more secretive and reluctant to provide ammunition for its critics. But two new books -- The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng by Harrison E. Salisbury (Little, Brown; 544 pages; $24.95) and The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng by John Byron and Robert Pack (Simon & Schuster; 560 pages; $27.50) -- indicate that glasnost is coming, inexorably, to Beijing. They provide the most detailed and personal accounts so far of the chaos, cruelty and corruption that Mao Zedong's reign inflicted on the nation...
...Claws of the Dragon, Byron and Pack focus on the career of the sinister Kang Sheng, relying mainly on an official Chinese biography that was prepared when Kang was posthumously expelled from the Communist Party in 1980. Pack is an investigative reporter, and Byron is the nom de plume of a "Western diplomat" who is apparently an intelligence officer. He picked up the internal document from a Chinese contact on a dark street in Beijing...
Also buttressed by interviews and Chinese publications, The Claws of the Dragon describes Kang -- a Politburo member and one of Mao's closest confidants -- as an opportunist without principles, interested solely in power, and also as a torturer, creator of China's gulag and a habitual opium user. By the early 1940s, the head of the secret police had consolidated his control over the party's social-affairs department, which had a "liquidation" division: "So notorious was Kang's taste for inflicting pain . . . it earned him a title," the King of Hell. The authors compare him with Iago, Rasputin...
...than 400 underground periodicals appearing in Poland, some with a circulation that exceeded 30,000. Books and pamphlets challenging the authority of the communist government were printed by the thousands. Comic books for children recast Polish fables and legends, with Jaruzelski pictured as the villain, communism as the red dragon and Walesa as the heroic knight. In church basements and homes, millions of viewers watched documentary videos produced and screened on the equipment smuggled into the country...