Not polished, not to be taken seriously, but a sexy, briskly paced entertainment. Beth is a swashbuckler.
A lively tale about an Irish-American lass from South Boston who marries the heir to Chinese billions.
Not that Beth Connor was ever your basic “Southie” girl next door. Hardly. An Olympic distance runner, she was already something of a celebrity when she fell in love with Harvard classmate Michael Chang. Then it was off to Hong Kong, where the perils awaiting her rivaled the storied Pauline’s (see Luk’s China Bride, 1998), but Beth—unflappable, unstoppable, indomitable (and only 21)—cut them down to manageable size. Now, in the weeks before the Hong Kong handover, we find her dealing with the subtleties involved in becoming “Chinesed.” She’s also dealing with the piggybacked subtleties derived from becoming a Chang. Her envious sisters-in-law hate her, her wastrel brother-in-law distrusts her, and her enigmatic mother-in-law is ever watchful, apparently hoping for some irreparable “mistake.” Big, bosomy, and flamboyantly blond she may be, but Beth is nobody’s stereotype. She hangs tough, earns the affection of Chang Wing Hing, the patriarch, and soon enough she’s learned enough about the far-flung Chang holdings to become a useful businesswoman. Beth’s troubles, however, transcend the familial and even the cultural. There’s murder, for instance, not to mention the unsettling fact that her own husband, less the paragon than he appeared while courting, might be the perp. Strangest of all is the matter of Peter Lau, a most attractive and determined would-be lover. In ways that are consistently amusing—though perhaps not as consistently believable—Beth copes. Which, at curtain, is how we leave her, taking on all comers and ready for what must certainly be, at least in the planning stage, the saga’s third installment.
Not polished, not to be taken seriously, but a sexy, briskly paced entertainment. Beth is a swashbuckler.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-87192-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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