The Shortest History of China

On the whole it's a great quick trip through an extremely complicated (and long) history. I appreciated having some of the early details foregrounded to make later allusions make sense. And the Chinese literary tradition is extremely rich in allusion. Just one example: understanding that protests in 1976 against “Qin Shihuang and the White-Boned Demon” (the tyrant founder of the Qin dynasty, and a fearsome female demon from the Ming-era novel Journey to the West) were very clearly protests against Chairman and Madame Mao.

I would have rated it 3 stars for sloppy editing — in many cases it took a little work to unpack pronoun references that a more thoughtful editing pass could have fixed –– but it's such a helpful distillation of ALL THE HISTORY that it's worth the effort.