An effective introduction to a lesser-known portion of the British Empire’s global history.
A brief history of the influence that the Scots and the Chinese have had upon each other’s countries and cultures.
Scots have been among the most influential Westerners in China since the early days of Britain’s Asian mercantile presence in the 18th century. This short but comprehensive overview introduces readers to the Scots missionaries, educators and merchants who helped shaped the two cultures’ relationship. Wotherspoon makes an effort to avoid generalizations about either ethnic group—as he notes explicitly in the book’s opening pages—by largely confining his history to the achievements of specific individuals instead of concentrating on broader trends. He highlights such notables as trader William Jardine, who rose to prominence when the East India Company lost its monopoly on the tea trade; Thomas Sutherland, founder of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank; and missionaries Robert Morrison and Dugald Christie. The book isn’t a critique of British imperialism, so the Scottish influence on China is largely celebrated, save for the Scots’ role in the opium trade. The book focuses primarily on Scots, but some Chinese figures also make appearances; some, such as student Huang Kuan, took advantage of Scotland’s higher education system, which, in the 19th century, offered more opportunities for outsiders than England’s Oxford or Cambridge did. Although Wotherspoon’s emphasis is largely historical, he also includes information on the current China-Scotland relationship; for example, Scotland is now home to more than 16,000 people of Chinese descent. Despite its brevity, the book manages to encompass a broad historical scope and includes numerous footnotes and citations. Readers may notice occasional, minor typographical errors (“King George 111”), but they do little to hamper the overall narrative.
An effective introduction to a lesser-known portion of the British Empire’s global history.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481025508
Page Count: 130
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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