Brian Griffith

You know who's afraid of your Chinese mother-in-law, February 11, 2012

This is a well done spin through the world of image creation around China. We see the perils of promoting brand China--where one person's wholesome virtue is another's lurking evil. What are those people up to with all that supposedly altruistic development work in Africa? How come they are pushing Confucius Institutes in a campus near you? Can they pull their own country out of 100th place in per-capita income ranking? Are Chinese super-moms gonna destroy childhood as we know it? What are Chinese people thinking about the future world order? What is the Yellow Man's burden?

The book is serious, but it's short and doesn't belabor its points. As Barr spins amusing tales, he looks… Read more

A wickedness that could cause seizures, February 4, 2012

This book is absolutely ridiculous, and it's dangerous to read. I tried reading it aloud to my dad, who was trying to recover from a stroke, and was warned of what happened to other heart patients. The tale has a timeless quality of vintage idiocy. The license McCall Smith takes in ridiculing other people's cultural and professional quirks is goes way beyond any genial ribbing allowed in the Prairie Home Companion. This is a casual wickedness that annihilates the separation between mutually ludicrous souls.

history with a sense of vertigo, January 23, 2012

Spence and Chin do a gripping job of capturing the anxiety, adventure, and hardship of China's twentieth century. Their photo-laden account is almost stomach-turningly dramatic, not in a shocking way, but because it conveys the vertigo of upheaval, destruction, and transformation. Perhaps no other nation, not even Russia, went through so much trauma and change in this century. And Spence and Chin's prose gives detailed insight into its stream of titanic events.