Tremendous insight into little-remembered yet crucial events at the beginning of the formation of modern China.
A vividly characterized account of the Lincheng Incident of 1923, a significant moment in the collision of cultures and political currents in post-imperial China.
Zimmerman, a Beijing-based lawyer who has lived and worked in China for more than 25 years, examines a largely forgotten yet important international incident: On May 6, 1923, an army of bandits attacked a luxury passenger train traveling from Shanghai to Peking, robbed and killed passengers, and took 120-plus hostages, many foreigners, to extract political concessions. The event exposed the lawlessness of China at the time and highlighted the eagerness of other nations to exploit the tumultuous post-imperial political landscape, mostly controlled by powerful warlords. Sun Mei-yao, a rebel peasant leader and former soldier and his army of disgruntled brigands—the so-called “Self-Governed Army for the Establishment of the Country”—aimed to bring international attention to the plight of those exploited by the ruling warlords. The group derailed the train near Lincheng in the middle of the night, looted it in waves, shot protestors, and dragged hostages on a forced march to the army’s hideaway at the top of Paotzuku Mountain. As the author demonstrates in this deeply researched text, sympathy lay with foreigners on the train, including American heiress Lucy Aldrich, John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s sister-in-law; John B. Powell, “publisher of Shanghai’s Weekly Review and the Chicago Tribune’s man in China”; Italian lawyer Giuseppe D. Musso, who represented the Shanghai Opium Combine; various U.S. military officers and their families; and a host of powerful Jewish businessmen. After many weeks, American fixer Roy Scott Anderson negotiated a peaceful release of the hostages. The perpetrators, despite reassurances of safety, received severe punishment. Zimmerman goes on to show how Mao Zedong later regarded the incident as a worthy peasant revolt that failed because it “lacked a unifying political strategy.”
Tremendous insight into little-remembered yet crucial events at the beginning of the formation of modern China.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781541701700
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.
Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.
“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780300270792
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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