A satisfying juggling act of academic research and engaging popular history.
A distillation of the international flavor of old Shanghai and its sublimated race relations through one wartime day of celebration, mourning, and horse racing.
Carter, a history professor and fellow of the National Committee on U.S.–China Relations, focuses on Nov. 12, 1941, when “three crowds gathered in Shanghai…in different locations and with very different motivations” but all “represent[ed] tremendous change amid the crises engulfing China.” It was the time of Japanese occupation, yet the International Settlement, the 3-square-mile area that served as an extraterritorial colony sheltering foreigners amid the bustling Chinese city, remained technically neutral. The Settlement was also the host of the vaunted Shanghai Race Club, whose last Champions Day race was held on this day. This event, ably portrayed by the author, drew the first—and largest—crowd. Originally established in 1850 by British residents who had elbowed their way into Shanghai commerce after the Opium Wars, the SRC gained popularity over the next few decades as more foreigners flocked to the prosperous city and horse racing grew in popularity among the Chinese. Excluded from joining the SRC, in the early 1900s Chinese merchants founded the International Recreation Club, located outside the IS, allowing the members to bypass “the complicated politics of the all-but colony.” The second crowd was celebrating the birthday of the late Sun Yat-sen (d. 1925), father of republican China, whose legacy was being co-opted by the city's Japanese occupiers. The third crowd was attending the ornate funeral of China's wealthiest woman, Liza Hardoon, “the half-Chinese, half-French Buddhist widow of a Baghdadi Jewish merchant, whose death symbolized the passing of a generation that had seen Shanghai rise to global prominence.” Carter, whose knowledge of Chinese history and culture is abundantly clear, moves fluidly back and forth between the historical perspective and the bitter moments when Japanese occupation would eclipse the city's once flamboyant heyday.
A satisfying juggling act of academic research and engaging popular history. (45 illustrations)Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-393-63594-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.
A popular novelist turns his hand to historical writing, focusing on what shipwrecks can tell us.
There’s something inherently romantic about shipwrecks: the mystery, the drama of disaster, the prospect of lost treasure. Gibbins, who’s found acclaim as an author of historical fiction, has long been fascinated with them, and his expertise in both archaeology and diving provides a tone of solid authority to his latest book. The author has personally dived on more than half the wrecks discussed in the book; for the other cases, he draws on historical records and accounts. “Wrecks offer special access to history at all…levels,” he writes. “Unlike many archaeological sites, a wreck represents a single event in which most of the objects were in use at that time and can often be closely dated. What might seem hazy in other evidence can be sharply defined, pointing the way to fresh insights.” Gibbins covers a wide variety of cases, including wrecks dating from classical times; a ship torpedoed during World War II; a Viking longship; a ship of Arab origin that foundered in Indonesian waters in the ninth century; the Mary Rose, the flagship of the navy of Henry VIII; and an Arctic exploring vessel, the Terror (for more on that ship, read Paul Watson’s Ice Ghost). Underwater excavation often produces valuable artifacts, but Gibbins is equally interested in the material that reveals the society of the time. He does an excellent job of placing each wreck within a broader context, as well as examining the human elements of the story. The result is a book that will appeal to readers with an interest in maritime history and who would enjoy a different, and enlightening, perspective.
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781250325372
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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