by Chen Guangcheng
Henry Holt, 330 pp.
In early 2012, Chen Guangcheng, a self-taught lawyer who had been blind since infancy, lived with his wife and two children in the village of Dongshigu, where he’d been raised, on the eastern edge of the North China plain. They were not there by choice. For a little over a decade, Chen had waged a public campaign against corruption, pollution, forced abortion, and other abuses of power. Officials had responded with escalating punishments. After he completed a four-year jail sentence on a charge of “obstructing traffic,” Chen and his family were confined to his ancestral home in a form of undeclared and indefinite house arrest. The local government covered the windows with metal sheeting and stationed guards around the building. Phones, computers, and televisions were forbidden. When one of Chen’s brothers died, Chen was permitted to send only his seven-year-old daughter to mourn him. To send back a message, another brother resorted to