The period in China's recent history between the death of Mao and the debacle of 1989 can be seen as a long decade, but also historically as a "lost" decade. It is "lost" in the sense that the political engagement of intellectuals and makers of culture has been occulted by official history-telling; it is also "lost" in that its memory has been abandoned even by many who lived through it; "lost" also in the embarrassed silence of those who prefer to focus on the subsequent economic miracle of the 1990s that gave rise to today's more prosperous China; and "lost" as a time of opportunity for cultural and political change that ultimately did not happen.The relevance of the "lost" decade to China's living, if untold, history was once more made clear by the conferral of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize on Liu Xiaobo, a political activist since 1989, and by the awarding of the 2010 Neustadt literature prize to the poet Duo Duo whose poetry and personal trajectory loom large in Lee's book.