Oliver Lee

Softcover, 303 pp.

This memoir describes the doomed marriage of Oliver Lee’s Chinese father and German mother. It then narrates Oliver’s childhood in Germany, China, Mauritius, Iran, and the U.S. His physical travels were followed by his ideological journey from anti-Communism in his youth to Marxism in his middle age and robust old age. The experiences that stimulated this journey include his close-up observation of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s victimization of Owen Lattimore, who was Oliver’s most admired professor at Johns Hopkins University; Oliver’s personal adversity, linked to his FBI file; in a Federal Government job; his conspicuous early opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam; his consequent two-year battle to reverse the University of Hawaiʻi’s decision to expel him; and his ultimate victory in that battle in 1969, with the help of hundreds of students and many faculty members.