Book Review:On Kingston's the Fifth Book of Peace

Driving home from her father's funeral service in 1991, Maxine Hong Kingston was forced to confront the wretched fact that her house in the Berkeley-Oakland hills was engulfed in flame. Kingston, the well-known writer for her semi-autobiography The Woman Warrior (1976), soon discovered that her book-in-progress and treasured possessions vanished with the fire. 'The Fourth Book of Peace,' as she intended to title this lost book, was a product originated from her research on the three lost Books of Peace in China. In order to retrieve her loss and come to terms with her traumatized experience in this accident, Kingston then started to write her fifth Book of Peace, in which the opening section was named 'Fire.'