RaveAsian Review of Books...the most comprehensive account you are ever likely to find of the building of the western section of America’s transcontinental railway ... Chang’s intention is to tell the story from the perspective of the Chinese navvies who did 90% of the work, though in that he’s severely handicapped by a lack of first-person source material. Chang hopefully asserts that, \'… recovery of a lost past is possible if imaginative efforts are made to understand the rich and expansive historical materials that do exist.\' Chang at one point describes his subjects as literate, but that’s surely an exaggeration. ... Chang lapses into imagined episodes and dialogue here and there, but his account is for the most part dispassionate and even scholarly ... Strangely, Prof Chang renders any Chinese terms in Mandarin, a language none of his subjects would have spoken, and using a Latin orthography developed by the communists a century later. Not perhaps what one might expect from a specialist scholar. But overall, Ghosts of Gold Mountain is an engrossing account which will interest any student of Chinese or American history.
Dane Huckelbridge
PositiveAsian Review of Books\"In No Beast so Fierce, Dane Huckelbridge tells the exciting true story of the extirpation of a man-eating tiger in colonial India in 1907 ... Huckelbridge allows himself some philosophical musing and imagined episodes which detract a bit from the veracity of his account, but overall No Beast So Fierce is an exciting read well worth your attention.\
Matthew Turner
PositiveAsian Review of BooksThe hugger-mugger gives Turner an opportunity to introduce several different regions of Japan and several aspects of its culture and daily life at that time. A couple of his deserters develop relationships with Japanese women, and Turner exploits those scenes to introduce aspects of family life in the 1960s. He has clearly spent a lot of time in Japan himself, and his settings are very realistic. Though realism fails him when he is tempted to include a failed prosecution in one of the tales ... Turner handles his three story lines well, inter-leaving chapters from each. His American characters in particular are very realistic ... So this is not a novel about Sweden, but a few hours with Sweden will be well spent. You’ll come away with an interesting picture of mid-century Japan and an appreciation of a little-known movement with a place in modern history.
Paige Williams
PositiveAsian Review of BooksIf it’s tragedy you seek, The Dinosaur Artist won’t disappoint ... Paige Williams tells Prokopi’s story clearly and with sympathy. It’s easy reading. The only stumbling block is the 100 pages of notes ... Readers really interested in her account need to keep interrupting the story to check the notes to ensure they’re not missing something. It’s worth the trouble.
Kate Harris
MixedThe Asian Review of BooksHarris does describe an almost year-long cycle trek from Turkey to Nepal and India, but her account unfortunately leaves us little wiser about conditions along her route today. She starts well—their trip through Turkey is pretty well documented—but then Harris seems to have tired of taking notes. Kyrgyzstan gets just two paragraphs ... Harris’s creation is to some extent autobiography masquerading as a travel tale. The trip itself fills about three-quarters of the 290 pages, but Harris’s account of it focuses to a substantial extent on her subjective perceptions. While there is plenty of sweat, fatigue and sunscreen as you would expect, and Harris is particularly interested in the stars and views of distant mountains, most of the text is a set of vignettes describing memorable people she met, but largely in terms of her own reactions to them. Her pursuit of a scientific career led her to study the history of science, so she is remarkably well-read in that field, but also in many others. So her road across Asia takes in many, many detours of the intellectual sort off the subject of the trip itself ... Still, the book is well written. Land of Lost Borders is a fluent treatise on the borders which had previously delimited Harris’ life, but if you’re interested in learning about the borders on today’s Silk Road, try Tim Cope.
William Atkins
PositiveAsian Review of BooksWilliam Atkins has done extensive and presumably rather expensive research for The Immeasurable World ... Atkins is very strong on the history, and provides a useful bibliography for each desert featuring 19th-century explorers who wrote about it in English ... There seem to be no useful generalizations. Taken together, Atkins’s essays present desert environments on four continents with a great deal in common but each distinct ... Regrettably, rather than straight reportage, Atkins’s style can be choppy. He cuts from one of these treatments to another in the middle of a story and then returns later to take up the narrative ... However, while the cartography is good, the cartographer apparently wasn’t given access to the text. The maps show all sorts of curious features but omit most of the places Atkins mentions ... That said, this is a very recommendable book. Atkins makes some perceptive comments about deserts you’re unlikely to read about anywhere else.
