Good book, made for Obama's crouwd

The Book is excellent when it touches the historical events, however there is a problem and it is a problem with some recent books, as soon as it goes into political and idelogical watters it loses everything.


All in all I would recommend this book

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Best book about China, dreadful pronunciation

This is, very simply, the best book to understand China. The author makes a persuasive case that, though some of the elements of modern China's view of itself are of "ancient" origin, the narrative in which they are presented comes from attempts to fit them into a worldview which was imported from Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Imperial "China" had no defined territory, no national identity, no concept of sovereign states and no common spoken language. The book is a marvellous account of how China borrowed or invented all of these and more, then projected them into the past. What's more, the tone of the book is humorous in an understated way, thanks to its matter-of-fact accounts of the activities of nationalists who took themselves extremely, extremely seriously. The story in the last chapter of how China's current aggression in the South China Sea is the result of translation errors and shoddy mapmaking in the 1930s is a particular highlight.

It's very unfortunate therefore that, though the narration is clear, well-paced and emotionally appropriate, the narrator's Chinese pronunciation is execrable: not just accented but completely incorrect, eg. pronouncing 会 (hui) as "hwee" and 史 (shi) as "shee". In a book where almost every sentence contains Chinese terms, often discussing those very terms at length, this is unacceptable. As a proficient Chinese speaker I could generally work out what he was trying to say, but the lack of any attempt to ensure correct pronunciation was a constant irritant.

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