Unbound (book)

Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival

Hardcover, 1st edition
Author	Dean King
Country	United States
Genre	narrative nonfiction
Published	March 24, 2010 Little, Brown and Company
Media type	Print (hardcover) Audiobook (CDs) E-book
Pages	432 pp (1st edition, hardcover)
ISBN
OCLC	419263135

Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival is a narrative nonfiction book by author Dean King. It follows the stories of the 30 women who undertook the Long March as part of the Chinese Red Army in 1934. While only 10,000 of the original 86,000 soldiers survived the 4,000 mile trek, all 30 women survived. To research the project, King interviewed the last surviving woman who marched with the First Army, and delved into historical accounts previously untranslated into English. As with his previous book, the nonfiction national bestseller Skeletons on the Zahara, he also traversed one of the most dangerous portions of the journey on foot, trekking in the Snowy Mountains and on the high-altitude bogs of western Sichuan Province (the deadliest part of the Long March).Unbound has been released in hardback, eBook, and audiobook.

Writing in the Southeast Asia Review, critic Daniel Metraux wrote: "Unbound is a must-read for any student of modern Chinese history and ranks with Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China (1939), a one of the classic narratives of the early Chinese Communist Party."

The context of the story is the Long March, a "desperate" military maneuver begun in October 1934 when Mao Zedong's Red Army (the early Chinese Communist Party) were surrounded by General Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist soldiers. Mao's army staged a massive retreat instead of surrendering, and over 86,000 soldiers of the "First Army" fled their enclave in the town of Yudu in Southeastern China. Their hope was to meet up with other Army groups and establish a new stronghold.