Book list: Repeat After Me

Rachel DeWoskin's Foreign Babes in Beijing -- a memoir of her unlikely career as a vampy soap opera star on Chinese TV in the 1990s -- is deservedly on the list of books that expats in China tell new arrivals they should read for a pop-culture feel of the place. My own reaction, when newly arrived, here.

DeWoskin's new book, Repeat After Me, is different: novel rather than memoir, set half in New York and half in Beijing rather than all on-scene in China. But the voice and nervous/sassy sensibility are similar, and similarly memorable. When I was reading it this summer, I marked a few passages that made me miss Beijing (no small achievement, just after I'd left) or that rang particularly true. The book's not at hand at the moment, so I'll just say: a book worth finding out about for yourself.

Better news: 'Hawk and Dove'

Nicholas Thompson's new book The Hawk and the Dove has received admiring reviews and was the subject of a wonderful feature story this past weekend in the New York Times. It's a very good work -- not least because it takes a gamble on a "high concept" for the book, and pulls it off.

Actually there are two high concepts here. One is that a paired biography of two often-contending figures of the Cold War era -- Paul Nitze and George Kennan (left and right, respectively, in the photo, often with the opposite orientation in their policies) -- will work in literary and intellectual terms. The other is that the author's relationship to one of the subjects -- Nitze was his grandfather -- will give him extra insight without warping his perspective. It succeeds on both counts.

Nicholas Thompson is 34 years old; I first met him a dozen years ago, when he was part of a student group pressuring US News to change its benighted college-ranking system. (I was then US News' editor. Story for another time.) Since then he has worked for great magazines -- the Washington Monthly, Legal Affairs, now Wired -- and been part of the New America Foundation. With all the woes of journalism, it's encouraging to see ambitious and talented people giving it their best.

Highly recommended: 'Lords of Finance'

If you were engrossed by today's NYT saga about Timothy Geithner as head of the NY Fed -- and even if you skipped past the story or didn't hear of it at all -- please make haste to read the saga of a previous incumbent of the job. Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed, tells the story of Benjamin Strong, head of the NY Fed through the 1920s, and of his central-banker counterparts in England, France, and Germany who, together and unwittingly, helped bring on the Great Depression.

Lords of Finance as it appeared to me on the trusty Kindle1 here in Beijing; physical copy not easy to get locally.
 

Economic theory has its place (and for me its place was grad-school classes). Well-done economic history is often far more illuminating. This is extremely well done history, and is worth mentioning now because of the obvious resonance between this tale of cleaning up after a bubble and today's predicament. Sample passage, about the 1920s but somehow sounds familiar:

Watching other people become rich is not much fun, especially if they do it overnight and without any effort. It was therefore inevitable that all this frenetic activity -- the thriving stock market, the new issues, the ballyhoo about a new era, the buying and selling of Florida real estate -- provoked a chorus of voices demanding that the Fed do something to stop the "orgy of speculation," a phrase that would become so commonplace over the next few years as to lose all meaning.

As it happens, Liaquat Ahamed and his wife Meena are friends of mine and my wife's, but I would recommend this book even if we'd never met.

'Typhoon' mystery partly explained

Thanks to all who wrote in with suggestions about why the elusive book Typhoon had apparently vanished into a black hole rather than reaching me in China, and what I might do about that. Among the things I have learned in the last few hours are:

- It's on sale at the moment at the Hong Kong Book Centre on Des Voeux Road;

- It's will be available six weeks from now, as a £7.99* paperback, direct from Penguin Books in the UK;

- It can be found in various overpriced hardcover versions, and not-yet-available paperbacks, via this Bookfinder site (and some others);

- Amazon.de will have the German paperback edition late next month too (hardback out of stock);

- It's been selling well in hardcover at Filigranes, a leading bookstore in Brussels;

- Large-print and audio editions are available from this site in England, for £17.95 and up; and (in addition to other reports)...

- It's in stock, and cheaper than any of the alternative in-stock sources, from Amazon.ca in Canada, for the equivalent of $18.62 USD.

So what have we learned here? That it doesn't make sense to try to have books shipped to China (expensive and uncertain). That Amazon.ca is probably the way to go, unless I want to wait six weeks. And that -- while I am grateful for many offers from people to mule the thing in on their next visit to Beijing -- it makes most sense to order one and have it shipped from Canada to the US, then pick it up on my next trip not too long from now.

Also, a consensus hypothesis that the UK hardcover publishers sold more books than they expected; that they didn't have a further press run -- especially as paperback date drew near; and that they have been lethargic about producing a US edition. What I learned when working in the White House decades ago is that blunder, misunderstanding, or miscalculation is usually the explanation for things, as opposed to hyper-sophisticated secret plans. That's probably why this book is so hard to find, as opposed to a deliberate suppression scheme.

What's left to the realm of mystery: whether the book I originally ordered just got lost or was detained; why the publishers didn't try to sell more hardbacks after the initial batch sold out; and why on earth the used copies on Amazon are listed at $75 up to $247.87.

Most important mystery: whether after all this, the damned book will be any good. At least I can count on being able to answer this question at some point.

Sincere thanks to all who volunteered their tips, info, and help.
____
* Yes, since previous post on this topic have found the right symbols for Pound and Euro.

A marketing mystery I cannot understand

This is a small thing, but intriguing (to me) because of the various strands it potentially connects. Background:

This past June, I heard about a new spy thriller called Typhoon, by the well-established UK writer Charles Cumming. It was set in China, so I put it into my "here's another way to learn about the country" mental in-basket. Its fictional time frame was the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. Since that was the real-world time frame in which I then lived, it moved up on my mental  "books I should read soon" list.



Better still, the plot apparently involved something I'd been reading and thinking about, and which was an important ongoing theme in internal Chinese news coverage: the possibility of separatist or disruptive activities by the Muslim Uighur population of China's far-northwestern Xinjiang region. The Chinese press portrayed this as the main "terrorist" threat to the Olympics, justifying tight security measures. In the novel, apparently the CIA was working with the Uighurs to stir things up. Hmmmm!

Could I buy this at a book store in Beijing? Not likely -- less for censorship reasons than because of the limited number of books that ever make their way here. So I checked online. I didn't find it from any of the normal US sources. But it was being published in England first, and Amazon.co.uk had it in stock.

I ordered a copy: 9.99 pounds for the book, 7.98 pounds for postage, and that when the pound was worth about $2. Part of the cost of expatriation. Order confirmed, book shipped to Beijing. And then... it never arrived.

Amazon.uk said it had indeed sent the book. The Royal Mail tracing service seemed to confirm that fact. Yet on the Chinese end, nothing got here. Hmmm again. But this is not so unusual with mail in and out of China. Things just get lost

Amazon.uk issued a full refund. Gracious of them. And I thought, I'll get this the next time I travel to the outside world.

So I went to America that autumn -- and still didn't find the book in any US stores or sites. Had no trips planned to England, so didn't try to pick it up there. For family reasons, kept going back to the US every few weeks. Kept checking. Never saw it.

Today I thought: let's find this book! And now I see it in stock on the Amazon.uk site for 42 pounds (ok, 41.99) and two copies on the main US Amazon site for either $75 or $247.87. What the hell???

I'm almost curious enough to buy the book at these inflated prices to get a clue about what is going on. Almost. But I can't help wondering why this book's marketing history is so odd.

Why, despite generally positive comments and reviews, has it seemingly vanished from circulation? Why, unlike numerous other books by the same author, did it never successfully cross the Atlantic to be published in the US? Why on earth are re-sellers now offering it for 4x to 10x its original price? None of this makes apparent sense.

I am very skeptical that mailroom censors would have kept the book from reaching me in Beijing. Far more obviously "sensitive" printed matter - in English - comes into the country every day. I had been reading the highly controversial Jon Halliday-Jung Chang Mao biography on one interminable Newark-Beijing flight. I absentmindedly kept it in my hand as I walked through the customs and immigration gates in Beijing. No one gave it a second glance. (General point: the authorities don't really care what non-Chinese citizens are reading in languages other than Chinese. More here.) Casual screwup is the more likely explanation.

But the book's fate in the English-language markets is puzzling to me. Has it been, in some way, suppressed? Did US or UK officials somehow signal that it would make trouble if left on the market? That's hard to imagine, but other explanations seem farfetched too. If anyone has the book and can offer a hypothesis, I'd be glad to hear it. And I'll buy it from you on my next trip home, for something less than $247.87.

A question I've often asked myself

From Kate Atkinson's chilling new novel When Will There Be Good News?, in a scene where a man drives through the hinterland in a rented car:

There was no signal on his phone, and the radio had given out nothing but crackle and hiss for some time now. The CD player contained one disc accidentally left over from the previous rental, and Jackson wondered in what circumstances he would feel so desperate for the sound of another voice that he would listen to Enya's.

(For Enya fans, this is just a little joke, occasioned by the view in our household that the most reliable gender marker is not in fact the Y-chromosome but rather an appetite for County Donegal's answer to Kenny G. No joke, though, Atkinson's book is remarkable.)

A wonderful new book: 'Now the Hell Will Start'

I read Now the Hell Will Start because I know and like the author. You should buy and read it because it's really good.



The is the first book by Brendan Koerner, a polymath writer in his 30s whom I met a decade ago when we were both at US News. Since then he has worked for Wired, the New York Times, and during its brilliant four-year run, Legal Affairs magazine. The book is different from anything he has attempted before and is a wonderful example of how narrative non-fiction should be done.

To say too much about the story would be unwise. I'll just say that it's a The Fugitive-style manhunt saga set before and during World War II. Like The Fugitive, it has its wronged protagonist on the run, chased by various obsessed pursuers. Unlike The Fugitive, it's a completely true story -- and one that along the way conveys fascinating historical, cultural, political, and scientific info. For instance, about segregated wartime life in Washington DC, how young women in headhunting tribes in Burma choose their mates, why Chiang Kai-Shek was a terrible general but a masterful schemer, what it's like to have dengue fever, and how the military justice system works. Above all it describes the realities and tensions of a U.S. military fighting tyranny worldwide but keeping its own black members in a separate caste.

I had never heard of this drama, involving a fugitive named Herman Perry, so I was surprised and moved by the ending (which gives the book's title great poignancy). Check it out.

Because the contested history of Tibet is likely to stay in the news

Let me mention a clarifying, valuable, and short book on the subject: The Snow Lion and the Dragon, by the Tibet scholar Melvyn Goldstein.
 
It's not quite a literary book, but it is a fact-filled and lucid explanation of the interactions, over the centuries, between respective rulers of China and those in control of Tibet. This includes "political Tibet" as now defined as an "autonomous region" of China, and the much larger "Greater Tibet" that spreads across several other Chinese regions and provinces where ethnic Tibetans live. Among other virtues, the book makes clear why the Chinese government can say what it does -- about China and Tibet having been connected in some form for centuries -- but also why Tibetans can say what they do, about their de facto independence in the 40 years before the Chinese Communists reasserted control.

Anyone working seriously in this field already knows about this book. Indeed I heard about it from Orville Schell, China expert and former dean of the UC Berkeley journalism school, when I asked him where to start on the topic. I mention it less for experts than for the much larger group of people who feel they should have some opinion on "the Tibet Question" but aren't that sure about the historical facts.

While admiring this book, maybe we can also agree that no future book about China need include the cliche "the Dragon" in its title?

Noirest of noir

The new "Hard Case" crime-fiction series is justly celebrated. This is a combination of "classic" pulp fiction from the post-WW II era and new noir novels. The covers are the initial selling point -- loving modern recreations of a lurid 50s-retro style. The one below is among the more violent looking; after the jump, samples of the more typical hot-dame type of luridness.

The few books I've read in the series have been very good, and Grifter's Game, above, is remarkable in two ways.

One, it's a kind of time capsule, showing what's changed, and hasn't, in U.S. pop culture. It came out in 1961, and some aspects seem positively antique. The protagonist needs to go from NYC to Cleveland -- so he takes the train. (Yes, it may come to that again.) TV broadcasts shut off after midnight. All prices need to be adjusted by a factor of ten or more. Newspapers cost a nickel, a good meal costs $2.50, a dollar bill is a huge tip.

Continue reading "Noirest of noir" »

A little more on news play in China

Following on this item earlier:

Front page of today's China Daily, the government's English-language presentation to the world. This is on Saturday, March 15, when news outlets elsewhere are leading with the Tibet news:

You can click on the photo for a larger version, but you're still likely to miss the Tibet news, which is in the very bottom left corner of the paper under the headline "Dalai Lama Behind Sabotage." In its entirety it reads as follows:

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Superior genre fiction: An Ordinary Spy

Some reviewers and blurbers have loved Joseph Weisberg's An Ordinary Spy ("In two words: a masterpiece," from Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan.) A few others have not -- you can go find those reviews yourself.

One of my rules of life is: there are a whole lot of terrible books out there, but many, many books deserve a better shake and wider audience than they receive. An Ordinary Spy deserves attention and a chance. Its immediately noticeable gimmick is that pages in the finished book have passages blacked out, "redacted," as if this really were what the fictional premise holds, the memoir of a CIA agent. The pages look like this:

and even, as the climax to one joke, this:

I found this artifice, and the resulting guesses about what was left out, increasingly interesting as the book went on; some reviewers were bored or annoyed.

But the book's real point is conveying what the craft of spying is like -- now, with all we know about failures of intelligence and America's blundering in the world. Weisberg himself is a former CIA agent. Is his account realistic? Well, the CIA's former chief of counterintelligence says so:

An Ordinary Spy captures perfectly the spy world I lived in my whole career, how we talk, how we think, and how we operate. Joe gets it better than Clancy and is on a par with McCarry.

The McCarry here is of course the sainted Charles McCarry, former CIA agent and author of The Tears of Autumn and many subsequent Paul Christopher novels. (McCarry is a good friend of mine; I have met Weisberg only briefly but do know his wife and brother.)

I have my own minor criticism of one element of Ordinary Spy's finale, which for spoiler reasons I won't mention except to say that the more you've read of Dennis Lehane, the more you'll see what I have in mind. But overall I thought this was a very good book. To be put in Charles McCarry's company, for knowledge of spycraft and for narrative skill, is high praise -- and deserved, I think. Check it out.

Another very good book: 'China Road'

I am remiss in not having said anything earlier about China Road, by NPR's long-time China correspondent Rob Gifford, which came out last summer.

The book has been widely and deservedly praised for its structure: a narrative of a trip along China's Route 312, a kind of Route-66 counterpart, which runs from Shanghai to the far northwestern Silk Road outpost of the country. Gifford knows the language, obviously enjoys the people, and has a good eye and ear. I have now been to most of the places Gifford describes, and reading his account of them both reminded me of what I'd seen and told me something new.

Gifford's obvious and undeniable love for China and average Chinese people allows him to pepper nearly every page of the book with tart, even harsh observations -- confident that they'll be seen in context of his overall affection for the place. (By analogy: I love America, but I've got a million complaints about my modern America. Although Gifford is obviously not Chinese, something similar it true between him and China.) I'll mention only two here, though there are many I'm tempted to quote.

First, a a small (and accurate) jab at prissy Westerners, which is on my mind as I pack for a quick trip to the U.S. Then after the jump, a jab more directly at China, which also corresponds to what I've seen. For the rest, get the book!

About Westerners:

The DVD is playing several hundred decibels above the level permitted in heavy industrial factories in the United States, though at first I don't realize this. It's only when the child in the seat behind leans over the back of the seat next to me and starts singing that I realize how, over time, I have become inoculated against Chinese noise... China does that do you. You go back to the United States or Europe , and people wonder why you're not jumping up and down with annoyance at some minor noise or irritation, and you look at them and think, What's your problem? We have such low thresholds of annoyance in our cozy Western world. (The danger is, though, that you also forget to fit back into Western ways of, say, road safety or table manners on returning to your homeland.)

Continue reading "Another very good book: 'China Road'" »

Yet a little more on fiction, genre, and memory

Not to run the topic into the ground, but: following this and this on what makes fiction remember-able (subtly different from memorable) and which "genre" books achieve that goal, a little more.

- I recognize that what I'm about to say slightly undercuts my point that powerful fiction, of any sort, gets into your mind and won't get out. Still I will confess that I (ahem) forgot to mention unforgettable genre books like Ken Bruen's The Guards and related novels, from the cop-and-criminal world of Ireland. Or, Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen mysteries, set in Venice. Dibdin's unrelated but remarkably creepy (and funny) The Dying of the Light is very much worth finding. Or, The Whispering Wall, by the Australian writer Patricia Carlon. (Premise: a rich old woman has had a stroke and can't talk or move, but she can hear and understand every detail of the plot being hatched by her relatives to do her in.) Or, three Japanese murder mysteries that have nothing in common except that each believably creates a sociopathic monster as the central character: Honeymoon to Nowhere, by Akimitsu Takagi; Out, by Natsuo Kirino; and the recently-released The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, by Soji Shimada. Or, for a monster of a different sort, the "Ripley" books by Patricia Highsmith.

- On remember-ability in general: I am not sure how I feel about the fact that on average I can remember movies more completely and clearly than I can remember books. Take some oddball feature I saw on a Saturday afternoon as a kid --The Cardinal, let's say, an Otto Preminger potboiler from the 1960s about a Boston boy who becomes a prince of the Church.

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An interim mystery/genre fiction update

Thanks very much to the many readers who have sent in lists of the genre fiction they admire and enjoy. That's the problem with offering any list of "good mystery novels." It's like a list of "good things to do with your time." For each one you include, there are a thousand you leave off. I will probably post (and update) a list of suggestions ... although, for the reasons mentioned above, that's an open-ended challenge that maybe I should skip. In any case, three brief points:

1) I kick myself for having forgotten to mention Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, a very short book I defy anyone to forget. (High class endorsement, from Stanley Kubrick: "Probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.") Also, perhaps strangely, the John D. MacDonald "Travis McGee" novels. "Strangely" because these have been so widely popular, Sidney Sheldon-style. But the character does stick in your mind -- mine, at least.

Continue reading "An interim mystery/genre fiction update" »

Good news: mystery fiction department

Like most people who enjoy spy novels and crime fiction, I feel vaguely guilty about this interest. I realize that crime fiction is classy now, and has taken over part of the describing-modern-life job that high-toned novelists abdicated when they moved into the universities. My friend Patrick Anderson*, who has reviewed mysteries for years at the Washington Post, recently published a very good book to this effect: The Triumph of the Thriller. Still, you feel a little cheesy when you see a stack of lurid mystery covers sitting next to the bed.

So I've figured out a way to tell the books I can feel good about reading from the ones I should wean myself from. The test is: can I remember something from the book a month later -- or, better, six months or a year on. This is the test I apply to "real" fiction too: surprisingly often, a great book is great because it presents a character, a mood, a facet of society, a predicament that you hadn't thought of before reading the book but that stays with you afterwards. Rabbit Angstrom, Captain Ahab, and Clyde Griffiths (of An American Tragedy), to choose the first three examples that pop into my mind from American fiction.

I say that "genre" fiction, like spy and crime novels, ascends into the "real" fiction category when the world it presents can exert the same tenacious hold on your mind. (Meta point: in choosing life activities, I place a high premium on things I'm likely to remember -- new places, new activities -- because otherwise you feel you're just tearing pages off the calendar, in the way that old-time movies illustrated the passage of the years.) As I've thought about it I've been struck by how many "genre" books marvelously pass the test. For example:

Continue reading "Good news: mystery fiction department" »

A superb book: Confessions

I've read histories and analyses of the Cultural Revolution years in China, plus some of the memoirs available in English. Still, it's hard to get a sense of what it was like.

Fewer and fewer people can actually remember the 1930s or 1940s, but we all feel we have a sense of what the Nazi era was like in Europe. There are so many novels, so many movies, so many memoirs, so many museums, so much accumulated lore, apart from the histories and analyses themselves. Life under Stalin is not quite as amply rendered for a world audience, but thanks to legions of Russian writers everyone has some idea.

For obvious reasons, there are far fewer public representations and reminders of daily life in China during the Cultural Revolution. Main reason: the current Chinese government is still uneasy about backwards looks at that era. Such documents as do exist, in Chinese, are less accessible to the rest of the world than are the German, French, English, Russian, etc memoirs of Word War II.

Here is a brilliant addition to the existing evidence: Confessions, by Kang Zhengguo, now a professor at Yale (and with an introduction by Perry Link of Princeton). Kang makes it sound as if he would have been a handful under any regime at any time. He said just what he thought, especially when he thought powerful people were being stupid; and he liked doing things exactly his own way. The book's subtitle is An Innocent Life in Communist China, and in his deadpan, innocent way Kang describes his downward process through the stages of horror as a prisoner and labor-camp inmate in those years. A depressing subject matter but never a depressing or uninteresting book. Very highly recommended.

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Writing, Flying, and Saint-Exupery

I've started reading Stacy Schiff's 1997 biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, about which I've heard only rave reviews and which indeed is wonderful so far. Every good omen that it will join A. Scott Berg's Lindbergh and Fred Howard's Wilbur and Orville on my list of first-rate biographies of fliers. I suppose that list should be extended to include Robert Coram's Boyd, about the military theorist and one-time fighter pilot John Boyd, and The Right Stuff, and....

But on the second page of her book, Stacy Schiff says something that rings completely wrong. Rather, it suggests to me that while she has admirably researched her subject, she has not made the imaginative leap to understanding what flying is about. She notes the obvious -- that Saint-Exupery was both a renowned writer and a career aviator -- and says:

Generally speaking the two are not professions that go well together. The writer lives with some detachment from experience, which it is his task to recast; a pilot works his trade with a fierce immediacy, perfect presence. One may reshape events; the other must nimbly accommodate them.

My experience and observation suggest exactly the reverse.

Continue reading "Writing, Flying, and Saint-Exupery" »

Why isn't this book more famous? (Stephen Amidon dept)

I’ve read Stephen Amidon’s Human Capital only now, three years after it came out. My main question is why people hadn’t been telling me about it before. OK, the operational explanation may well be that it got dismissive “not quite up to snuff” handling in the all-powerful NYT. For instance, right near the top of Michiko Kakutani’s “we are not amused” review was: “The novel never lives up to its Dreiseresque ambitions…And those larger aims sometimes clash with the author’s more commercial impulses to write a made-for-the-movies thriller.” Etc.

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A great 'graphic novel': Shenzhen by Guy Delisle

I have been spending a lot of time in southern China, especially in the factory-wonderworld of the Pearl River Delta region. The latest China Southern flight from Shenzhen, in this delta, back to Shanghai was delayed many hours -- "Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to tell you that Flight XXXX to Shanghai will be delayed because of: delay." But the time was more pleasant thanks to Guy Delisle's wonderful comic book -- oops, graphic novel -- about his own journey to the same city, Shenzhen.

Continue reading "A great 'graphic novel': Shenzhen by Guy Delisle" »

Yet another very good book

China Shakes the World, by James Kynge, for many years the FT's correspondent in Beijing. Given his obvious immersion in and affinity for the culture, it is the more impressive when Kynge takes a hard line at the end: The rise of a power that is in the world trading system, but not really of it, poses problems for everyone else.

This is a line of analysis I am familiar and sympathetic with -- as it applies to Japan. I have not yet reached that point about China. Not sure why, or whether it's just a matter of time. In any case, this is valuable book.

A mystery of driving explained

In an article in the December issue of the Atlantic, which is published abnormally late for reasons I don't fully grasp, I mention that the traffic-death rate per mile driven is roughly ten times higher in China than in North America. Nothing so shocking about that:

Continue reading "A mystery of driving explained" »

Another book well worth reading

John Pomfret's China Lessons, mentioned earlier, is a subtle and insightful account of China's political evolution and devolution. Timothy Clissold's Mr. China is a subtle and insightful account of China's political and economic evoution and devolution -- and is absolutely hilarious as well. Two aspects of life that loom larger and larger in my own experience are central themes here. One is what I think of as the "paradox of slipshodness."

Continue reading "Another book well worth reading" »

Another book worth reading: Foreign Babes in Beijing

As mentioned earlier, John Pomfret's Chinese Lessons is a powerful and well-structured new book. A weirdly appropriate complement is Rachel DeWoskin's Foreign Babes in Beijing, published last year. Genuinely funny, frivolous by design, and as far as I can tell, insightful.