Wood is a wonderful storyteller who captures the big picture without losing sight of the human detail.
“Writing on China’s past…is a daunting task, all the more so if one is not a sinologist,” notes Wood in the preface. “China is a huge and incredibly rich, indeed inexhaustible subject….With more than three millennia of written records, it has a vast history—small libraries have been written about each of my individual chapters!” In this smoothly readable book, the author shows he is up to the task, presenting a useful one-volume study of Chinese history perfect for students and libraries. Though Wood concentrates on the main dynasties, he sometimes veers into micro-level, intricate family stories to create a sense of immediacy amid the far-reaching historical currents. He moves swiftly yet thoroughly, wisely using geography to ground and orient readers. Like the ancient inhabitants of the Tigris-Euphrates river system, the earliest Chinese communities were tied closely to the Yellow River. These first civilizations were not near the sea but resided in the central plain, close to where the river emerges from the mountains—hence, China's early name as Zhongguo, the "middle land." Wood traces the rise and fall of the great dynasties who received "heaven's mandate," from King Yu's descendants (circa 1900 B.C.E.) to the Zhou, Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing. Throughout the book, Wood masterfully extracts real stories, including those by remarkable women writers and observers such as the Song poet Li Qingzhao and Ming poet Fang Weiyi. The author also gives attention to the many heartbreaking tales that emerged from the tumultuous Cultural Revolution. Scholars may debate some points, but Wood ably conveys the exciting Chinese saga through the ages in an accessible work that makes a massive historical narrative palatable to general readers.
Wood is a wonderful storyteller who captures the big picture without losing sight of the human detail.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-20257-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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