Book excerpt: This story of love and devotion begins in the winter of 1948, when Pearl Buck, the Nobel Prize-winning author of "The Good Earth" and other books about East Asia, was contacted by a New York adoption agency desperately searching for a home for an unwanted dark-skinned East Indian-American child. Pearl Buck responded quickly and compassionately and recruited the author's Mennonite parents to care for this one-year-old child. Nine more Asian-American children were sponsored by Buck and raised by the Yoders in Bucks County, Pa.