About the Author

Ruth Price taught English for several years at CUNY, has worked for the New York City and state governments, and was press secretary for Bella Abzug. She has published several works of genre fiction. The Lives of Agnes Smedley, her first nonfiction book, is the result of more than 15 years of work.

Reviews

"It is owing to the strength and brilliance of Price's rivetingly well-written book that one can disagree with her conclusion and her desire to depict Smedley as a heroine, and still recommend her work as a moving and genuinely dramatic biographical portrait."--National Review
"An exceptionally rich and exhaustively researched biography of one of the cold war's most enigmatic characters....Price's painstaking portrait of this tenacious iconoclast is a revelatory wonder, confirming what intense government investigations could not, but successfully depicting Smedley's motivations as sincere rather than sinister."--Booklist
"Price has clearly devoted a significant amount of time and effort to researching Agnes Smedley, and her careful examination pays off in this intimate yet inclusive biography."--Library Journal
"Masterful, beautifully written....Price paints a vibrant portrait not only of her subject but of the many worlds in which she was a major player. Price captures neatly and with great nuance the complicated, often contradictory impulses and activities of these political movements. But at the heart of the book is her clear-eyed portrait of the very complicated Smedley, who acted out of humane motives but not always for the best causes."--Publishers
Weekly
"A deeply sympathetic and yet starkly revealing portrait of one of our best known feminist heroines. It beautifully evokes the tensions of a radical life, without exonerating her for the questionable choices she made. Best of all, this carefully researched biography reads like a novel. You wont be able to put it down."--Alice Kessler-Harris, author of In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America
"Based on astonishingly thorough research in newly available Chinese, Russian, British, and American archives....Her account of how a poorly educated woman from a dysfunctional Midwestern family became a figure in the public and clandestine drama of twentieth-century radical politics is a fascinating story."--Weekly Standard
"It is owing to the strength and brilliance of Price's rivetingly well-written book that one can disagree with her conclusion and her desire to depict Smedley as a heroine, and still recommend her work as a moving and genuinely dramatic biographical portrait."--National Review