Andrés's review
China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia
by Peter C. Perdue
Andrés's review
China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia by Peter C. Perdue
Andrés's review
rating:
** spoiler alert **
A painfully poorly written book. Though chapters 13 and 14 are good, the rest are to various degrees forgettable. Chapters 10 and 11 are what happen when historians try to make statistical analyses or explain economic concepts: the reader hardly understands the author since the author hardly understands what he's talking about. Chapter 14 should have been good, but wasn't. Chapters 15 and 16 betwen them contain perhaps a single page of useful analysis. Chapters 4 through 7 could have told an interesting story about the Manchu conquest of Xinjiang, Tibet, and western Mongolia. I could go on, but I would be just as guilty of repeating myself as the author was. This book has 250, maybe 300 pages of useful information. It's thus a great pity that it's 565 pages long. It's also a great pity that it continues the horrid Western practice of including pinyin (pinyin instead actual characters for godssake!) in books on China. Look, a non-specialist hasn't the foggiest idea about pinyin and a sp...more
