SOURCE: Niebuhr, Reinhold. “Blind Anger.” Nation 157, no. 11 (11 September 1943): 300-02.

In the following review, Niebuhr offers a negative assessment of Between Tears and Laughter.

We have learned to respect and appreciate Lin Yutang as a kind of Wise Man from the East. Beginning with My Country and My People, in which he interpreted Chinese culture for the West, he expounded a philosophy which in our Western tradition would be called Epicurean but which he defined as a combination of Confucian and Taoist viewpoints. He gloried in the earth-bound and sober common sense of Confucianism and poured his scorn upon the heaven-storming fanaticisms of the West.

Perhaps he intended the same spirit to permeate his new book [Between Tears and Laughter], for we are told that the Chinese title, literally translated, means “weeping, laughter, both wrong.” But the tragedies of the war have long since drawn him out of his...