Sunday, May 12, 2013

Book reviews

During my 2011 trip, I kept a running commentary on the books I was reading. I'm doing a lot of reading now, so I thought I'd rekindle the tradition here. Enjoy!




Forgotten Kingdom - Peter Goullart







Forgotten Kingdom is the personal story of a Russian man who goes to work for the Chinese government setting up cooperatives in northwestern Yunnan province, specifically the town of Lijiang. The story of how Peter Goullart got to the tiny outpost in the 1930s is interesting in its own right. His family fled Moscow during the revolution and settled in Shanghai where, as a young man, Peter picked up Chinese and gained experience as a tour guide. He travelled deeper into China to Kunming, where we’re living now, but quickly found the remote hills of northwest Yunnan more attractive. The first half of the book on how he got to Lijiang was my favorite. The second half mainly documents Naxi and other minority groups’ culture in the area, while heaping on plenty of self-praise for his own achievements with the cooperatives. The book is a must read for anyone travelling in the area (Lijiang is now a UNESCO world heritage site) but, as a short-term resident here painfully aware of all the challenges foreigners face in China, I’d be more interested in hearing about his failures in Lijiang. I’d be grateful to have been able to read a book about foreigners’ failures in Yunnan province. I remember hearing a review of such a book on NPR a while ago so it’s out there. It just isn’t this one.





On China - Henry Kissinger





Bryn got an audio version of this one for me for Christmas, soon after we decided to move to China. Kissinger lays out about 500 years of Chinese international relations history, making clear that China developed a very different way of viewing the world and engaging in international relations from the standard strategies and practices that emerged out of Europe over the past 500 years. China’s superiority in virtual isolation didn’t help it though once it did finally come into regular contact with Europe starting in the 19th century and China was quickly overrun. But China has faced wave-upon-wave of uprisings usurping dynastic power over its history. Kissinger argues that Chinese diplomacy and politics attempts to surround, absorb and assimilate outside threats rather than attack them head-on as western powers tend to do. This patient and giving approach to international relations may make China appear to lose, but “the invisible hand” of Chinese bureaucracy always comes out on top. The second half of the book deals with Kissinger’s role in re-establishing ties between the US and China in 1972. The anecdotes about interacting with Mao personalize the leader and differentiate his extreme rhetoric and actions from his clear, practical strategic vision.





Wild Swans - Jung Chang





I read Wild Swans at the same time that I was reading On China and they make great reading companions. Wild Swans is the story of three generations of women growing up during the 20th century. It gave a personal point of view to the calamities of the Communist revolution, Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Jung’s family was pretty harshly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and so she definitely portrays herself and her family as the stoic victims, which, naturally, she has the right to do. She wrote the book in the 1990s, well after history had condemned Mao’s social experiments. Even though she was just a girl during the 1960s, I would love to have gotten her point of view at the time, rather than in hindsight. I get the feeling that she’s trying to protect the integrity of her family’s name rather than portray a controversial era through impersonal reporting. But that’s to be expected from a family memoir. Kissinger can provide the cold, hard historical analysis. Nevertheless, after reading her book, every time I talk to someone here over the age of 50, I have an overwhelming urge to ask them what it was like here during the 1960s. Has their opinion of the time changed over the years as others have come out and condemned it? I know from my experience in Germany that those who lived through the Nazi era weren’t particularly alarmed at the situation then - their moral derision of the time period didn’t come until later, after it had become acceptable to reject those ideas. Unlike in Germany though, I haven’t mustered the courage yet to actually broach the subject here..



Flashman - George Macdonald Fraser

Flashman is a series of books written in the 1960s and 70s about the fictional memoirs of Henry Flashman, captain in the British Army. It’s historical fiction, well researched and educational. But whereas reading ACTUAL personal accounts of history, which run into the problem of the narrator trying to preserve their and their family’s honor, this fictional account of the Afghan rebellion and British retreat from Kabul in 1842 is sullied with all the cowardice and dishonor that British officers actually portrayed. He adulterizes local women, angering the locals, evades his duty when he’s too afraid, takes credit for victory when he is the lone survivor of battle and only survived because he hid in fear, and all sorts of other “cowardly” acts. But the essential truth within Flashman is that bravery and ideology tend to get you killed, and for a comfortable gentleman like Flashman, there’s never anything to be gained from dying. If you survive, you get to write the history and take credit for the sacrifices of others. Afterall, they’re dead, so they can’t contest you!

Mandalay to Momien - John Anderson

John Anderson was a doctor and naturalist who accompanied a British mission to explore the trade routes between Mandalay, Burma and southwest China (present day Yunnan province) back in the late 19th century. I tried to overlay the likely reality of Flashman over Anderson’s brave, stoic account of the month long trips over rivers and hills. Whenever he said something like, “the village was full of handsome women” I interpreted that to mean that he likely took advantage of as many women as he could during his stay there. It’s hard to fess up to such adventures - especially as an officer in Queen Victoria’s army. Anyways, Anderson’s account of the borderlands between Burma and China are very interesting and very detailed. His trip should be retraced by a braver traveller than me. The land borders between China and Burma are closed to foreigners now and there is internmittent fighting between the government and a variety of border minority groups. It was an enexplored frontier then and it’s not much better understood today. His accounts of the difficulties in logistics was also really interesting. Imagine moving a party of several hundred people, all of their equipment, provisions, gifts for VIPs along the way and extra space to bring along specimens along unmarked paths in unfamiliar terrain and you’ve got a convoy stretched out over several days. The missions is a force in and of itself that changes the landscape and local politics as it goes.

Diplomacy - Henry Kissinger

An epic read on the evolution of the international system over the past half-century. It was also the first book I read on a Kindle. I’m sure I spared myself many hand cramps by holding the slender device instead of the 900 page behemoth. First, this is a must read for anyone seriously pursuing international relations. I’m embarassed that I hadn’t read it earlier. You won’t necessarily learn a whole lot of new history, but the value added that Kissinger provides is in the elegance of the narrative that he weaves, connecting all those years of history and international relations together. He makes sense of the world in a way that I had picked up over the past several years in one volume. The core lesson I took out of it is that great leaders need to both have a intellectual vision for where their state needs to go to be the most successful and an innate understanding of their citizens’ capabilities so that the leader can make the transition without ruining the state in the process. In “Diplomacy”, Kissinger documents plenty of leaders who achieved that balancing act and plenty of leaders who failed. He teaches in only a way that someone who practiced statesmanship could teach, connecting the big picture, overarching framework to the miniscule, individual events that comprise it.

Burmese Days - George Orwell

Burmese Days was Orwell’s first novel and is often overlooked. I hadn’t heard of it until I started researching books to read on Myanmar for our upcoming trip. It’s a relatively simple novel with only a few characters, which I like. It portrays a small town on the upper Irrawaddy river and life for the few British subjects who have settled there. It’s a very focused story on Burma - it doesn’t span generations, capturing the big picture of Burma like Amitav Ghosh’s “Glass Palace” (which I am reading now). You certainly won’t come away with a sophisticated understanding of Burma after reading Burmese Days, but it’s a great introduction to the place, the customs, the vocabulary and a little of the history. As I read “Glass Palace” I find that the value of “Burmese Days” has increased. I suppose it’s best as an appetizer in a multi-course study of Burma.  

Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction - Damien Keown

Bryn and I were wandering around one of the many Buddhist temples in our neighborhood one day and I became so overwhelmed with ignorance that I rushed to the library and checked out this book on Buddhism. I really like the Oxford University Press “Very Short Introduction to....” series - there are over 200 now. The point that stood out to me the most was one that Kissinger had also made: when studying China and East Asia, you have to overcome the myths that westerners have come up with in attempts to frame East Asia as what the West is not. Studied from a western perspective, East Asian philosophy and religion is often attributed by critics of western culture as protagonists against the western antagonist. But that approach won’t neccesarily help you understand how people here, in East Asia, view Buddhism. Reading the book has helped me understand what’s going on in temples more. One scroll Bryn and I found in the Yunnan Provincial Museum depicted a hierarchy of creatures -humanoid and not - engaging in all types of ceremonies. I realized that it was a “roadmap to Nirvana” showing all the levels of devils, earthly world, titans and Gods, leading up to the Buddha. It was an amazing image, about 30 feet long and intricately painted. Just having a little insight into that work of art made reading the book worthwhile.  

Medici Money - Tim Parks

This book has a very intriguing premise, but gets a little too wound up in the weeds of 15th century Florentine politics for my taste. I read it thinking it would be a good way to learn a little bit about the history of finance and Italy in one go in preparation for grad school. It served both purposes, with an emphasis on “a little bit”. The idea is that the de’ Medici family got its start as bankers in the late 14th century, operating on the frontier of legal and religious propriety by dealing in usury - the charging of interest. Financial prowess trumps cultural norms though and the de’ Medici family manages to improve its position in Florence to the point of essentially ruling the kingdom as despots. The book describes how four generations of de’ Medicis leveraged their financial assets to win favor in the political and religious world. Starting off as prudent bankers, as their wealth grew, they couldn’t help but get involved in political matters. They had to manage the transition from banking magnates to political leaders carefully; being a prudent banker doesn’t make for an inspiring politician, and being a charismatic leader is typically bad for business. But by the time Lorenzo de’ Medici ruled the bank, the fourth generation to do so, the solvency of the bank didn’t much matter anymore because the family had achieved political power and elevated their station in life yet again. The idea is really interesting to me and kind of reminds me of Mexican drug traffickers and how we will view them generations from now: as criminals or the forefathers of a new Mexico?

But between the flashes of insight in Medici Money, there are long slogs of Florentine political history that only link back to the central premise tenuously and relies heavily on a large and hard to remember cast of characters. Still, it makes me want to read more about the Medicis to learn how a family can transform itself over generations, remaking the social fabric of a city to serve its own interests in the process.

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