Her son Carl Crook said the cause of death, in a hospital, was pneumonia. Mrs. Crook was among the last of a generation of Westerners born to missionaries in China in the decades before the Japanese invasion, World War II and the subsequent Communist revolution. But others, including Mrs. Crook, perceived the Communists as saviors who were lifting the country out of colonial squalor. (Still others, like the American diplomat John Paton Davies, made famous as a target of McCarthy-era attacks, fell somewhere in between.) As an anthropologist, Mrs. Crook saw herself as an observer of social change; as a Communist, she saw herself as an agent of it.

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Persons: Isabel Crook, Carl Crook, Crook, Henry Luce, . Crook, saviors, John Paton Davies, McCarthy Organizations: Communists, Communist Locations: China, Communist, Beijing, American