CHIANG KAI-SHEK
By
A flaccid, formless book, overweighted with scenes of childhood (by the fifth chapter Chiang's only fourteen) and gratuitous gossip (e.g. the ""scandal"" of Sun Yat-sen's marriage to Ching-ling Soong) and overprotective of Chiang's reputation. Whether or not he ""wanted"" to be a dictator (a specious syllogism purports to prove that he didn't), the Kuomintang was a party dictatorship; his ""notorious stubbornness"" aside, experts agree that he made concessions to his captors during the Sian incident. . . and so on and so on up to Formosa as an ""honest, efficient, progressive"" democracy. Cornelia Spencer's less-than-ideal biography (1968, p. 128, J-56) is far sounder as well as better structured.