TWIB-III: 20 (2/23-3/01)
Mar. 14th, 2009 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanI only read one book on the week in question, but it was a good one.
1) Wild Grass – Ian Johnson
Wild Grass: Three Portraits of Change in Modern China is a compilation of Wall Street Journal reporter Johnson's journalism on Chinese political dissidents. Johnson, who won a Pulitzer for previous reporting on the country, fares much better than others in his attempt to edit newspaper reporting into book format; for the most part, Wild Grass reads like a book and not a series of articles hastily slapped together with some half-hearted filler.
But what really makes Johnson's work stand out is his nuanced attention to his subjects: he allows his reporting to speak for itself instead of ramming his own views down readers' throats. While he decries China's corruption and political repression, he avoids the easy out of immediately painting all officials as supervillains and all dissidents as blameless martyrs. Wild Grass will help readers understand how the system’s momentum turns everyday individuals into murderers of their countrypeople and destroyers of their heritage, and how the twin desires for political opening and maintenance of party control have reached an impasse. Read this book.
That will be all.
1) Wild Grass – Ian Johnson
Wild Grass: Three Portraits of Change in Modern China is a compilation of Wall Street Journal reporter Johnson's journalism on Chinese political dissidents. Johnson, who won a Pulitzer for previous reporting on the country, fares much better than others in his attempt to edit newspaper reporting into book format; for the most part, Wild Grass reads like a book and not a series of articles hastily slapped together with some half-hearted filler.
But what really makes Johnson's work stand out is his nuanced attention to his subjects: he allows his reporting to speak for itself instead of ramming his own views down readers' throats. While he decries China's corruption and political repression, he avoids the easy out of immediately painting all officials as supervillains and all dissidents as blameless martyrs. Wild Grass will help readers understand how the system’s momentum turns everyday individuals into murderers of their countrypeople and destroyers of their heritage, and how the twin desires for political opening and maintenance of party control have reached an impasse. Read this book.
That will be all.