Category: Reviews

Suzanne Sataline reviews Patriot Number One by Lauren Hilgers

For weeks after reading Lauren Hilger’s debut book, Patriot Number One, I tried to embrace the concept of yin and yang. The collegial writer in me would like to say that the book is a first author’s loving tribute to an immigrant family’s struggle with identity and rebirth. The twisted journalist in my soul would counter that this is a young writer’s valiant attempt to stitch together two magazine stories into one topical, yet slender book.

Alas, I am no Taoist.

Christina Larson reviews High Speed Empire by Will Doig

During a smoggy January week this year in New Delhi, I attended the third annual Raisina Dialogue – a coming-out party of sorts for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s growing foreign-policy ambitions, packed with panel discussions that cast a wary eye toward China. There weren’t many speakers from mainland China among the hundreds of attendees mingling in luxurious ballrooms at the Taj Mahal hotel, but the question of Beijing’s rising influence across Asia loomed. On one panel, the leaders of four major navies – the US, Japan, Australia and India – discussed how to respond to this common rival. Another panel asked what perilous strings were attached to new continental infrastructure-funding schemes, a clear reference to Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative.

Grant Newsham reviews Crashing the Party by Scott Savitt

In 2011 – more than a decade after journalist Scott Savitt’s 20-year career in China ended with a month spent starving in a Beijing prison cell – Henry Kissinger published his diplomatic memoir On China, a 500-page tome stuffed with insider stories of opening China and, according to one review, “efforts by Kissinger to get us to think of him as a major geopolitical thinker proved right by history.” While On China has been described in turns as magisterial and bloviating, something is missing from it. And that is the Chinese people themselves. Indeed, Chinese citizens outside a narrow elite with whom the Kissinger seems to deal exclusively come across as wraithlike irrelevancies whose suffering doesn’t matter much.

Savitt’s memoir, the picaresque, poignant Crashing the Party, takes us beyond Zhongnanhai, the seat of Party rule, and brings us closer to the “soul” of the country.

Susan Blumberg-Kason reviews Creating Across Cultures

Sometime during my early years of learning Mandarin, I heard the name Michelle Vosper. If memory serves me right, my Mandarin tutor back in 1990 mentioned a friend or acquaintance in Hong Kong, where I was headed at the end of that summer for a study abroad year. I never met Ms. Vosper that year or the other four I lived in Hong Kong, but it seemed serendipitous when I was introduced to her book late last year in Chicago by the English translators of Hong Kong playwright Candace Chong’s Wild Boar.

Vosper’s edited volume, Creating Across Cultures: Women in the Arts from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, features 16 women artists from Greater China, including Chong, one of Hong Kong’s most sought-after playwrights.