Volume 20, Number 13 · August 9, 1973
Traveling Light
By Martin Bernal
The Chinese Difference
by Joseph Kraft
Saturday Review Press, 113 pp., $6.95
Notes from China
by Barbara Tuchman
Collier, 112 pp., $1.25 (paper)
A China Passage
by John Kenneth Galbraith
Houghton Mifflin, 143 pp., $5.95
To Peking and Beyond: A Report on the New Asia
by Harrison Salisbury
Quadrangle, 308 pp., $7.95
With the exception of Joseph Kraft's short work, all the books on China mentioned here have been padded. Barbara Tuchman includes a fascinating historical essay. Galbraith has animadversions on San Francisco, Paris, TWA, and many other matters, and Harrison Salisbury adds chapters on Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Salisbury has a great deal to say about China, but the others would have done better to follow Joseph Alsop's example and content themselves with two or three magazine articles instead of writing one slight and anemic book. The books tend to reveal more about their authors than about China. This does not mean that they are worthless. The authors are all intelligent and skillful. What is more, some of them had seen China before 1949, and Harrison Salisbury and Barbara Tuchman were on the fringes of the group of Americans who between 1925 and 1950 established the closest and most useful personal relations foreigners have ever made in China.
Review, 4578 words
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