SOURCE: "New Rulers Stalk the Land, But the Good Earth Remains," in New York Times Book Review, August 8, 1969, p. 26.

In the following review, Pippett discusses the China portrayed in Buck's The Three Daughters of Madame Liang.

Pearl Buck's great novel, The Good Earth, described the life of Chinese peasants. Published in 1931, it was written out of intimate knowledge of actual conditions and mental attitudes; as an imaginative but truthful interpretation of East to West it deservedly won its author the Nobel Prize.

Now, 38 years and many books later, Mrs. Buck again interprets East to West in The Three Daughters of Madame Liang, a story of China today, a country vastly changed from the land she knew. Yet the barriers to communication between the United States and Mainland China seem to disappear as we read a novel that convinces us it is a true tale about real people.

Madame...