Author, journalist, and broadcaster Simon Winchester spoke today (12/17/2009) to Great Barrington Waldorf High School students about the history of China and about Joseph Needham, about whom he has just published a biography, The Man Who Loved China.
Mr. Winchester held the students’ attention for more than an hour with moving and humorous stories from the life of Needham and the history of China. According to Winchester, Needham, a colorful British scientist, was the man who changed the West’s view of China, demonstrating the depth and breadth of Chinese civilization, and documenting hundreds of inventions from China that only later appeared in the West. Needham was also a founder of UNESCO and a Morris dancer. As a student, he was told not to think of small things, but to “think in oceans.” In publishing more than twenty volumes on Chinese science and civilization, he did just that.
For the past three weeks, Peter Elliston has been teaching a seminar to the 10th, 11th, and 12th graders on the history and culture of China. Students have read Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, about the power of literature, individuality, and the Cultural Revolution in China. They have also explored and discussed the geography, history, and culture of China with Mr. Elliston and several other visiting experts, of which Mr. Winchester is the most recent.
Mr. Winchester has worked as a foreign correspondent for most of his career and has been a freelance writer since 1987. He has written The River at the Center of the World, about China’s Yangtze River; the bestselling The Professor and the Madman; The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans, which recounts his journey from Austria to Turkey during the 1999 Kosovo crisis; and the bestselling The Map That Changed the World, about the nineteenth-century geologist William Smith. His books Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 and A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 both have been New York Times bestsellers.