The Chinese in America: A Narrative History by Iris Chang
413 pages
Published 2003
Read from October 7 to October 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Nonfiction books in general, and histories in particular, are more difficult to assign some arbitrary grading metric than novels. I more or less weigh the quality and depth of the information provided against the dexterity of the presentation, including prose, editing, and illustrations. (Why editing? Well, when no one involved in the process of producing a major tome bothers to check if substantial portions of identical information or quotations are repeated in separate chapters, for example, as in Robert Hughes' Rome or W. B. Bartlett's Mongols, I see that as a significant detraction from the book as a whole.) A book can be excellently written but supply little in the way of new or interesting history, retreading the same old paths of European royalty and wars viewed from the winning rulers' perspective. The Chinese in America takes the opposite course, examining fascinating and entirely under-reported experiences and perspectives from the documents and oral histories of Chinese immigrants and American-Born Chinese, but presenting it in commonplace news-magazine prose. It's a readable mixture, and the material Chang covers is significant and essential (in large part because it has been almost universally ignored by mainstream history), but I do wish she'd avoided so many lazy truisms about seeking the American Dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment