About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Jung Chang
Mixed The Guardian (UK) The book’s strongest point is its nuanced sympathy for the sisters ... A little oddly for a group biography of three remarkable women, however, the book sometimes veers off into male-dominated accounts of their context. The opening chapter focuses entirely on Sun Yat-sen; the second on the girls’ father. This periodic sidelining of the women expresses, of course, the paradox of their status (a paradox that applies to many other female Chinese politicians of the past 100 years). They were able to exercise influence only through association with powerful, deeply flawed men. The book would have benefited from more reflection on the tensions and limits faced by ambitious women in 20th-century China – and on the challenges this poses for telling their stories.
Stephen R. Platt
Rave The Guardian Stephen R. Platt’s excellent new history of China and its relations with Britain and the U.S. in the 50 years up to 1839 could hardly be more timely. One of the best anglophone historians of late imperial China writing today, Platt immerses the reader in the friendships and frustrations, pleasures and hazards of a formative period in Sino-western relations ... Platt writes beautifully, with a novelist’s eye for detail. He skilfully weaves through the book a cast of eccentric characters who mediated between China, Britain and the U.S. ... It vividly evokes both the tragic consequences of British impatience over trade with China, and the stories of the many westerners and Chinese people who pragmatically coexisted and cooperated for decades before the declaration of war.
Ian Johnson
Rave The Guardian In his fascinating odyssey through contemporary Chinese religion, Ian Johnson uncovers the roots of these tensions, and the contradictory, complex face of religion in China today ... The book is full of moving encounters with Chinese citizens struggling to find the 'lost middle' of the country known as Middle Kingdom ... Johnson succeeds in having produced a nuanced group portrait of Chinese citizens striving for non-material answers in an era of frenetic materialism.
Frank Dikotter
Positive The Guardian Dikötter’s well-researched and readable new book on the Cultural Revolution’s causes and consequences is a crucial reminder of the tragedies, miscalculations and human costs of Mao’s last experiment.