Editorial Reviews From Booklist

Twelve years after completing college in China, Zeng was sentenced to 12 months'' re-education in a labor camp. Her crime? Writing a letter to her parents-in-law explaining her practice of Falun Gong, which has continued to affect her mentally, spiritually, and physically. She characterizes Falun Gong as a form of qigong, the practice of mind and body improvement through exercise and meditation, though most Westerners, she says, would place it in the realm of the paranormal.

The craze for it hit China in the early 1980s, and in a few years, its practitioners numbered more than 100 million. Fearful of it as a new, independent ideology, the government cracked down. Zeng was among the first in Beijing to be sentenced, and the purge affected other members of her family--in particular her sister, also imprisoned.

She has started life over in Australia, and her description of abuse and torture, including electric-shock treatment, constitutes an often harrowing, powerful reminder of what can happen when government power runs unchecked.

June Sawyers
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ennifer launches her book "Witnessing History: one woman's fight for freedom and Falun Gong" in May, 2005, in Melbourne, Australia.