Thread Of The Silkworm Tsien Hsue Shen

Thread of the Silkworm tells the story of one of the most monumental blunders the United States committed during its era of McCarthyism. It is the biography of Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen, a pioneer of the American space age who was mysteriously accused of being a Communist and deported to China, where he became — to America's continuing chagrin — the father of the Chinese missile program.

"A captivating account...illustrates how the excesses of the McCarthy era drove talent from America to the benefit of another nation." Arnold Kramish, Manhattan Project scientist and author of The Griffin

"Tsien Hsue-Shen deserves a place beside Sergei Korolev and Wernher von Braun in the pantheon of rocketry. But no historian possessed the unique technical and linguistic skills needed to attempt his biography until Iris Chang." Walter A. McDougall, author of The Heavens and the Earth

"A page-turner...Iris Chang tells a fascinating tale in Thread of the Silkworm." Los Angeles Times

The definitive biography of Tsien Hsue-Shen, the pioneer of the American space age who was mysteriously accused of being a communist, deported, and became—to Americas continuing chagrin—the father of the Chinese missile program.

Iris Chang lived and worked in California. She was a journalism graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana and worked briefly as a reporter in Chicago before winning a graduate fellowship to the writing seminars program at The Johns Hopkins University. Her first book, Thread of the Silkworm (the story of Tsien Hsue-shen, father of the Peoples Republic of Chinas missile program) received world-wide critical acclaim. She is the recipient of the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundations Program on Peace and International Cooperation award, as well as major grants from the National Science Foundation, the Pacific Cultural Foundation, and the Harry Truman Library. She passed away in 2004.