From Iris Chang
As the author of Thread of the Silkworm (a biography of the founder of the Chinese missile programme), I was appalled to read the following statement in the brief review of my book (6 January, p 37): “Unfortunately, the book has a fatal flaw: since his expulsion, Tsien has consistently refused interviews with Western journalists. He made no exception for Chang who wrote the biography without his help.”
One can only assume, then, that under this reviewer’s criteria, every unauthorised biography is fatally flawed, as well as biographies written by authors who have never met their subjects because those subjects were dead long before the projects began.
Every attempt was made on my part to interview Dr. Tsien. When no interview was forthcoming, I did the next best thing: I interviewed those people who knew him best – former colleagues, students, classmates, even Tsien’s own son. In the end, I conducted hundreds of hours of interviews on two continents and amassed thousands of pages of primary source material unearthed from private collections and from government, academic and corporate archives all over the United States.
The statement in your review serves little purpose other than to discourage authors from daring to probe into the lives of controversial, powerful individuals.
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