CHINA
Political and Economic
China Shakes The World by James Kynge.
Winner in 2007 of the prestigious Best Business Book of the Year Award. A must for anybody who wants to understand China as it is today, and its far reaching and expanding influence into every part of our lives. Beautifully written, it is as important and revelatory for the 2000s as Simon Leys’ Chinese Shadows which lifted the lid in the 1970s on what really happened during the Cultural Revolution , and in so doing changed our perceptions.
One Billion Customers by James MacGregor
If a businessman wanted to read just one book to understand how to operate in China, this is it. Pithy, anecdotal it encapsulates a lifetime’s experience as a China pundit and trader, with an invaluable Little Red Book of Dos and Donts at the end of each chapter. Jim tells it how it is.
Historical
A History in Three Keys by Paul A Cohen
A magnificent study of the historiography of the Boxer Rebellion, showing how interpretations of what happened during that tumultuous event transmute according to the perspective of different participants and each future generation.
Mao Zedong: A Penguin Life by Jonathan Spence
No historian has revealed more about China than Jonathan Spence, whether it is the experience of foreigners in To Change China; or the analysis of obscure incidents that reveal the soul and culture of a nation in Treason By the Book and his latest work, Return To Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Ming Man; or his magisterial narrative history of the last three hundred years The Search for Modern China. In this short biography of Mao, Professor Spence casts light on the life, significance and enigma of China’s communist leader with greater incision and insight than any other who has attempted it
The Chinese by Jasper Becker
Jasper has written on all sorts of subjects related to China, Mongolia and North Korea. His history of China’s great famine during the Great Leap Forward, Hungry Ghosts, told a story that was previously little known in the West. In The Chinese he incorporates all his extensive experience as a journalist and years of research into a portrait of a people.
Shanghai by Harriet Sergeant
Harriet’s original research including interviews with survivors from Shanghai’s heyday in the 1930s has produced a cavalcade of a book in which all the various characters – Western, Chinese, Russian – who populated Shanghai and made it the roaring city it was, appear in turn to create a panorama that will live in your mind long after you close the last page. The book is funny, fascinating, tragic and always compelling. It recreates a lost world.
Literary fiction
The Concubine of Shanghai by Hong Ying
Hong Ying was voted last year by China’s bookshops to be one of the best 100 Chinese writers since Confucius as well as being one of the 10 greatest living ones. Her autobiography, Daughter of the River, was the best written and also the most revealing, poetic and also the most hardboiled account of ordinary life during the Cultural Revolution – a must for anybody who wants to understand China. The Concubine of Shanghai, the first volume of her Shanghai trilogy, which is set against the gangster world in Shanghai at the turn of the last century, is an epic of gritty realism, tragedy and poetic atmosphere which tells the story of what the city was really like in its most romantic era. It is being published for the first time in English this year.
The Blue Lotus by Hergé
Hergé never went to China, but this illustrated Tintin adventure captures the atmosphere of the country during the buildup to the Sino Japanese war. I will challenge anybody and say it the best Tintin book he ever wrote. It is also as good, realistic and evocative an introduction to China, as well as being both thrilling, funny and enjoyable, as any book I know.
Detective fiction
The Pool of Unease by Catherine Sampson
In this third volume of her Robin Ballantyne mysteries, this popular crime writer brings her plucky heroine to China and in so doing she meets another great literary creation, the redoubtable detective Song.
GENERAL
Thrillers
The History Book by Humphrey Hawksley
The novel published last year I would take on a train or a plane with me. A thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat from the first page, it is an all too believable account, written by a front line journalist in all the world’s trouble spots, of a Britain that has become a police state after today’s War on Terror has been taken to its logical conclusions. An exciting but also a frightening read which puts Humphrey Hawksley into the top league of thriller writers today.
Historical fiction
Hannibal by Ross Leckie
Not the serial killer with a mask over his face portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, this is the Hannibal of history who took his elephants over the Alps and nearly brought down Rome. There has been a spate of excellent novels about Rome lately (by Allan Massie, Conn Igulden and others) but Leckie’s trilogy is one of the best researched and vividly portrays the darker civilisation of Carthage and the genius of one of the world’s most extraordinary generals. If Scipio, the hero of Leckie’s second volume, had not defeated him, mainland Europe might be speaking a variation of Punic today not Latin.
History
Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross
William Shawcross has recently been writing books on all sorts of subjects including the Iraq War and the Queen but the book I always go back to is his first, Sideshow. Apart from possibly being the best book ever written on the Vietnam conflict, the cynicism, duplicity and tragedy he reveals about America’s bombing of Cambodia have lessons for today.
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Two histories of Russia, one showing the terror of every day life under Stalin’s regime, the other the extraordinary story of how Stalin rose to power. In the year of the millenium people voted for who they thought qualifed for the title of The Man of the Twentieth Century. The optimists said Einstein. The realists said Stalin – and these two authors reveal the dismal years of his black reign more chillingly than any other historians have ever attempted.
A History of the English Peoples since 1900 by Andrew Roberts
Andrew Roberts brings Winston Churchill’s history up to date. This is not just a history of Britain or America in the Twentieth Century but of every country where English is spoken as a common language. I was once at a dinner in Beijing during which Lady Thatcher spoke forcefully of the virtues of democracy, law and liberty that were unique to Anglo Saxon nations. It led to a heated argument and it is indeed a tendentious question in a politically correct age. Andrew’s book attempts to provide the evidence for this view, seeking the common threads that tie differing cultures together by a common system of values enshrined in our spoken language. This was never more true than during the Second World War when dominions and even colonies joined Britain in a common struggle for liberty, and his argument is that it still holds true today. Whether you agree or not, Andrew’s ebullient style makes for a roller coaster of a read and brings a century to life.
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