THE BAREFOOT LAWYER

A Blind Man’s Fight for Justice and Freedom in China

By Chen Guangcheng

330 pp. Holt, $30.

Though his case made worldwide headlines when he fled to the American Embassy in Beijing in 2012, Chen’s book sheds important new light on both the life of this self-taught lawyer and the political winds that propelled him away from the remote village where he and his family were being kept under house arrest.

Born in 1971 in an impoverished rural community, Chen lost his sight when he was a baby, the result of an untreated fever. The natural world was his first classroom, but at the age of 17 he sought out a formal education. Soon he began using what he had learned to advocate for others with disabilities, for victims of industrial pollution and for those suffering under China’s one-child policy. And so the focus of his story shifts, from triumph over adversity to persecution by the authorities, who subjected him to years of detentions, interrogations and beatings.

Continue reading at The New York Times Book Review