Between Tears and Laughter

Now sorrowful, now joking, but always in deadly earnest, the Chinese philosopher faces the grim facts of war and the grimmer prospects of peace. Dismayed by the materialism of the West, he offers not a “blueprint” for the postwar world, but an approach to thinking about it, that is new to us but not new at all to the Orient, wise in the ways of Man.

This book is a positive contribution from the store of Chinese political philosophy to the vexed question of world peace. More important than the Four Freedoms, says Lin, is Freedom from Humbug. The changes in our thinking must be basic if we are to be saved from utter disaster. We cannot be saved by science, by mathematics, by modern mechanism. We need deep draughts of the wine of wisdom, matured through four thousand years by Asiatic thought and experience in learning how man must deal with man.

Confucius and Lao-tse, the ancient Greeks and the Hindus, join forces with Lin Yutang in his thrusts at such topics as: The White Man’s Burden, American Isolationism, British Imperialism, Nazi Geopolitics, the Crimes of Europe, The Future of Asia, and The Crux of the Modern Age.

No citizen of the Western world can ignore this wisdom and this warning except at his own peril.

“A powerful and relentless warning.”—Boston Herald

“If you think a gentle, well-mannered philosopher can’t deliver a punch, you’d better read this book. It’s out-and-out sensational, no less, enormously, provocative.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“He gives us, mixed with the tolerance and humor of the philosopher, some of the plainest speaking we have had in a long time on the issue of the war and the peace.”—The New Yorker