A Few Good Books

THE LAST EMPRESS by Hannah Pakula (2009)

Madame Chiang Kai-shek may have acted like royalty, but she was not really China’s ‘Last Empress,’ as the title of this book declares. Instead, Madame Chiang broke the mold for women in China, where she was the first and most influential First Lady ever.

It’s a good story. A story of wartime travails, of high-stakes political gambling, of an epic fight-to-the-finish between authoritarian Nationalists and radical Communists. It’s also a story of a tempestuous partnership between an ascetic military man and his glamorous, winsome, shrewd and luxury-loving wife. He needed her connections to American money. She wanted his access to power. Time Magazine named them ‘Man and Woman of the Year’ in 1938, essentially colluding in their myth-making. Together, they led China, and then lost it.

Madame Chiang dazzled Franklin Roosevelt, bedded Wendell Wilkie, backstabbed Gen. Joseph Stilwell and, for a time, enthralled the greater American public. Dynamic, vain, literary, and ambitious – she’s a great subject for a long biography.

‘The Last Empress’ is a beautifully designed book, with an inviting cover and an excellent array of photographs. Unfortunately, what lies between the covers is not as magical. The author, Hannah Pakula, often seems tone-deaf to the subtleties of Chinese culture and history. Pakula previously wrote biographies of a Romanian Queen and a Prussian Princess. Here, her extended historical scene-setting can get distant from any connection to Madame Chiang. She does not match the insight and clarity of Laura Tyson Li’s 2006 biography of Madame Chiang, or the originality of Emily Hahn’s ‘The Soong Sisters’ from 1942.

Then again, Madame Chiang’s story is so engrossing that, for those who like an old-fashioned approach, this long-form rendering is still pretty absorbing. Madame Chiang’s life spanned the entire 20th Century, and she lived through a period of considerable upheaval, intersecting with quite a cast of characters.

Here's my full review from the LA Times:
http:/​/​articles.latimes.com/​2009/​dec/​04/​entertainment/​la-et-book4-2009dec04

WHEN CHINA RULES THE WORLD by Martin Jacques (2009)

Like many journalists who covered China in 1989, I became convinced that the Communist Party would fall to ashes within a few years, having lost all credibility at Tiananmen Square. Did not happen.

As China’s economy took off in the 1990s, I knew for sure that steady growth would force the country to become more democratic. Wrong again.
At least I was joined by Western economists who broadly agreed that China’s modernization would mandate the accepted rules of Western finance by becoming more transparent and legally accountable, starting with a freely convertible currency. Right?

Nope. As Martin Jacques argues effectively in “When China Rules the World,” the West has misjudged China because it is our bedrock assumption that modern financial and political systems have to follow some basic principles of openness, rule of law and democracy. That is the system that bred the United States, and paved the way for its world domination, from 1945 onward.

Jacques makes the case that when China is the dominant power, it will make the rules. It will likely create a new international paradigm, one that is just as hard for Americans to foresee as it was for the British a century ago to see their own decline, and as it was for the Romans, long before that.

“The West has, for the most part, become imprisoned within its own assumptions,” Jacques writes. “Progress is invariably defined in terms of degrees of Westernization, with the consequence that the West must always occupy the summit of human development.”

In the past few years, I have seen dozens of books about China’s rise. Most of them are terrible. This one is the exception, the book that offers true food for thought. Jacques has limitations, and his predictions about the future are flimsy. But his crititque of Western assumptions is trenchant.

WAITING FOR DAISY by Peggy Orenstein (2006)

For anyone who has been pulled involuntarily into the wasteland known as 'fertility hell', this book will bring tears of recognition and peals of laughter, and will leave you with moments of hard-earned wisdom, too. It is a deeply-felt emotional and spiritual journey, and Orenstein is a lovely writer who pulls the threads together beautifully.

METROPOLIS by Elizabeth Gaffney (2005)

After about 50 pages, I felt drawn in. After 90, I was fully hooked. I liked the tactile portrayal of old New York, its skeletal structure and pungent, awful smells. When the book’s hero begins navigating the secret tunnels of the sewer system, the details feel just right and the story seems to gain narrative power. The book’s opening is unsteady, as if to mirror the disorientation of a fresh immigrant like our main protagonist. He is repeatedly misjudged, misled, and mistaken. He keeps changing his own name. Despair looms, and almost snuffs out luck and timing. Yet the story has a sure traction, and I felt I had to know what was going to happen next.

I might have guessed from the book’s cover that our hero would graduate to a job building the Brooklyn Bridge, with its architectural majesty and construction nightmares, a striking symbol of the striving New Yorkers in the Tweed-and-gang era. Gaffney evidently loves the bridge, and plays with it as a fitting counterpoint to the sprawling sewers. She’s a fine writer. I felt more than willing to roll with her jolty chronological sidesteps. They make her story feel somewhat old-fashioned and mildly idiosyncratic at the same time. And she creates lots of appealing, intriguing characters. My own favorites were Meg Dolan, Queen Mother of the stealthy gang that is the muscle of this story, and Luther Undertoe, the wayward soul and antichrist. All the characters in this book have to battle the physical challenges of daily life in the 1870s. Their emotional paths move in multifarious directions for unknowable reasons. They are rendered human, and we are watchers. Grateful ones.

NETHERLAND by Joseph O'Neill (2008)

Lyrical, moving, evocative. O'Neill has an outsider's eye, and a loving New Yorker's knowledge of the city, brimming with sub-cultures that remain invisible to most of us. The West Indians and assorted ex-Commonwealthers who play cricket in Staten Island are one such group, and a vehicle for O'Neill's story. Excellent sense of place, knowing and feeling neighborhoods. O'Neill's protagonist is morose about his crumbling marriage, yet the writing is so gentle and fine that I would follow him anywhere. Deeply enjoyable.

'In Search of My Homeland' by Er Tai Gao (2009)

'Gilead' by Marilynne Robinson (2006)

'Black Boy' by Richard Wright (1945)

'The Anglo Files' by Sarah Lyall (2008)

'Last Lion: The Fall & Rise of Ted Kennedy' by Peter Canellos (2009)

'Birds Without Wings' by Louis de Bernieres (2004)

'Betrayal' by Andrew Kirtzman (2009)

'Too Good to Be True' by Erin Arvedlund (2009)

'Vox' by Nicholson Baker (1992)

'A Little History of the World' by E. H. Gombrich (1936)

'Tis' by Frank McCourt (1999)

'1789: Threshold of the Moden Age" by David Andress (2009)

'Samuel Johnson: A New Biography' by Peter Martin (2008)

'Beverly Hills Adjacent' by Jennifer Steinhauer (2009)

'The View From the Bridge' by Nicholas Meyer (2009)

'The East, the West and Sex' by Richard Bernstein

'Gang Leader for a Day' by Sudhir Venkatesh (2008)

'The Whiskey Rebels' by David Liss (2008)

'The Master' by Colm Toibin

'The Snakehead' by Patrick Radden Keefe (2009)

'Prisoner of the State' edited by Adi Ignatius (2009)

'Traitor to His Class - FDR' by H.W. Brands (2009)

'House of Cards' by William Cohan (2009)

'In Search of Deep Throat' by Leonard Garment (2000)

'The Secret Man' by Bob Woodward (2005)

'China High' by ZZ (2009)

'A Comrade Lost and Found' by Jan Wong (2008)

'American Wife' by Curtis Sittenfeld (2008)

"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao' by Junot Diaz (2007)

'Sir Vidia's Shadow' by Paul Theroux (1998)

'A Hope in the Unseen' by Ron Suskind (1998)