Essential desk-side reference to help with the sifting and understanding of the enormous changes taking place in a China...
A sweeping, reasoned history portrays China as still caught in its age-old bind between authoritarianism and the need to join the world.
The nation’s economic transformation since the end of the 1970s under Deng Xiaoping has been “blinding and unprecedented,” notes journalist and China historian Fenby (Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin & Churchill Won One War and Began Another, 2007, etc.). Moreover, it was achieved on the heels of a deeply flawed past not yet fully assessed and comprehended. The theory of the Mandate of Heaven—which gained its apotheosis during the Middle Kingdom and established a stratified master-servant relationship that ran from the court down to rural villages—is still reflected in the huge disparity of wealth between the top and bottom, the author avers. The arrival of Westerners eager for economic exploitation in the mid-19th century added to China’s instability. Fenby considers China’s booming present in terms of its convulsive recent history: the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911; the establishment of a republic; the election of revolutionary theorist Sun Yat-sen; anarchy of the warlords and aggression by the Japanese; debilitating civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists followed by the latter’s victory in 1949. The magisterial sections covering the “Rule of Mao” incorporate strands from China’s past to highlight the Great Helmsmen’s monstrously despotic policies, which used millions of lives as fodder for his increasingly irrational dreams. The author completes his thorough survey with an evaluation of the Deng era and the disastrous Beijing Spring of 1989, closing with a look at the recent regime’s efforts to maintain stability through a combination of ideology, reform and party loyalty.
Essential desk-side reference to help with the sifting and understanding of the enormous changes taking place in a China poised between the old and the new.Pub Date: June 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-166116-7
Page Count: 740
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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