"I never meant to stay in China ..."And so begins this gripping true-life saga of adventure, love, commitment, betrayal, despair, and hope. Sidney Rittenberg is The Man Who Stayed Behind.Recounted in the best tradition of epic storytelling, Sidney Rittenberg's story is destined to take a place beside the classics of its genre. Like T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, this is the story of a man who voyaged deep into a secret world and returned to tell the tale. Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, it is the story of a man who looked evil in the face and survived. Like John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, it is the story of a man who followed his convictions wherever they led him.Sidney Rittenberg's story is an eyewitness account of history as it unfolded. He went to China with the U.S. military in the mid-1940s. Deeply committed to helping the people, he sought out the Chinese Communists in their wartime headquarters in Yanan. He joined in overland marches and lived alongside the revolutionaries, taking part in secret meetings. He argued dogma with Mao Zedong, mused philosophy with Zhou Enlai, danced with Mao's wife, Jiang Qing.He shows a seldom-seen personal side of the revolutionaries: an insomniac Mao prowling the villages at night, his bodyguard fifty yards behind; a playful Mao, dancing to the strains of "Turkey in the Straw"; an enraged Mao, face contorted with fury, stomping away from a meeting with Khrushchev. Rittenberg also offers the only inside view available today of the takeover of power during the Cultural Revolution of a major Chinese government body.He shows us firsthand the inhumanity of the Communist regime: His is an inspiring account of a triumphant struggle over madness and despair in prison during six years in solitary confinement on trumped-up spy charges. Then he tells of ten more years, a decade later, spent in solitary confinement alongside other political prisoners who fell afoul of the dominant faction during the Cultural Revolution. He presents an unforgettable prison portrait of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, condemned finally to the very prison where she had sent Rittenberg nearly a decade earlier.There is also the touching love story of a wife who pledged to wait for ten years for the man she loved - and who was forced by fate to make good on that promise.Sidney Rittenberg's story is one that will be read on many different levels. It is a serious book that will be must reading for China-watchers and scholars alike. But more than that, it is both a compelling personal story and a poignant and thought-provoking exploration of some of the most profound political and moral issues of the century. Read Less