Recounts the life of the nineteenth-century German philosopher and interprets his ideas which played a revolutionary role in the development of Communism.
Starting in 1972 when she is nine years old, Ling, the daughter of two doctors, struggles to make sense of the communists' Cultural Revolution, which empties stores of food, homes of appliances deemed "bourgeois, " and people of laughter.
The author, who was a chief correspondent for the New York Times in Germany, recalls the events associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe.
