TALES OF HONG KONG

Tangy trivia strictly for would-be tourists, vacationing salesmen, and affluent wives. Reporter Gleason tells how to rent a bar girl from the mama-san, haggle with a merchant, extract free drinks from a hotel proprietor, and generally overlook the poor and bewildered who inhabit much of Hong Kong. Gleason, a former reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and New York Herald Tribune, has recently been making a second career of books on the Here he rehashes much of the material in Hong Kong (1964). That book had the single virtue of recasting Hong Kong from a city of Chinese junks, Charlie Chans, and Dan Duryeas to a thriving, overcrowded marketplace, cramped by mainland China. Here he makes more of Red China's economic, cultural, and political shadow--they run the Bank of China, a ourishing propaganda and ivory trade, and a thriving insurgency program. But, generally speaking, Gleason offers no new picture. Tales of Hong Kong is strictly a remake.