PositiveThe Times Higher Education (UK)These days, historians of China and foreign correspondents usually focus on a particular period or a single figure. What a pleasure to read a significant, original book that covers millennia of Chinese history in an informal, often chatty, but always learned style ... Brook contends that China has always been part of the larger world ... When the now-victorious Han republicans set about establishing their new Chinese state, they quickly discovered, according to Brook, that they had not created a new Great State. It is that huge weakness that the Chinese, from the time of Mao Zedong to that of Xi Jinping, have sought to remedy, from Central Asia and across the seas far from their shores – the policy that, as Brook skilfully makes clear, greatly alarms us today.
Fredrik Logevall
RaveThe New York Review of BooksThe eight-hundred-plus pages of [Logevall\'s] Embers of War provide the most comprehensive account available of the French Vietnamese war, America’s involvement, and the beginning of the US-directed struggle ... Older readers will read this book with admiration for Logevall’s copious sources in English, French, and Vietnamese (in translation) and agree with his analysis ... This is not to assert that Logevall obscures or misses the main points; on the contrary, he makes them well but sometimes at too great a length. Somewhat fuller footnotes and a more compact text would have tightened his narrative ... His two books, especially Embers of War, tell the deeply immoral story of the Vietnam wars convincingly and more fully than any others ... A considerable achievement.
Karl Marlantes
PanThe New York Review of BooksKarl Marlantes, a much-decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam, originally wrote a book of over 1,600 pages; now, at almost six hundred pages, it is still very long and sometimes awkwardly written … Matterhorn is very violent, with its casualties like the Marine whose feet are blown off and another in agony because a leech has entered his penis. Such scenes take up many pages … In Matterhorn we don’t come to the inner life of the Marines simply from their actions or speech. We are left with flat attempts to describe their thoughts. One can almost see a comic-book character with the word ‘Thinks’ in a balloon over his head.
