Reviews for Lucy's twentieth century

The average rating for Lucy's twentieth century based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-18 00:00:00 Sokudju MacKenzie My second book this year was Jan Morris's Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere and I enjoyed that one so much that I vowed to read another of hers about some distant city each forthcoming year. But only one a year! I figured this would take me to the end of my days. And I almost made it to next year. But then I started reading about ongoing riots in Hong Kong and how even LeBron James had to scold an executive of a basketball team for not being "educated" about Hong Kong (the executive apparently voicing support for human rights). So I thought I would start to get educated. Conveniently, Jan Morris has written of Hong Kong; and, well, it is almost next year. This book was written in 1988, which is important because that is exactly nine years before Britain would turn over Hong Kong to China. So it's a very interesting perspective. There is the history (how Hong Kong got British in the first place) as well as a look around at the state of things before the lease expires. This allows Morris, then, to ask And now what? What issues will there be? And so we can read today's news as a tableau, better informed and almost educated. Morris explains all this very well, with recognizable wit and charm. Although it did almost get tedious. Here are some Morris insights and reflections: -- The later Victorians built Victorianly, regardless in their confident way of climate or precedent. -- The beauty is the beauty, like it or not, of the capitalist system. More than a usual share of the city's energies goes towards the making of money, and nobody has ever pretended otherwise. -- An old tale tells of the Chinese gentleman who, watching a pair of Englishmen sweating away at a game of tennis, inquired why they did not hire coolies to play it for them. -- An American airline pilot once told me that he never made the landing without a clenching of the stomach, so demanding is the flight path, and no passenger who has ever flown into modern Kai Tak, especially at night, is likely to forget the excitement of the experience, as the harbor unfolds itself around one's windows, as the myriad of lights glitter, as first the mountains, then the skyscrapers rush by, and one lands mysteriously on the runway among the waters, the deep blue of the seas on either side, the starry blue sky above, as in the middle of some fabulously illuminated bowl of glass. -- Many of the British themselves could not contemplate the existence of Hong Kong, however dazzlingly it spoke of British enterprise and even of British benevolence, without some tremor of vicarious shame. Most of them knew very little about Hong Kong, but they did know there was something disreputable about its possession. Wasn't it something to do with opium? Weren't the police supposed to be bent? Hadn't they read something in the Guardian about a disgraceful lack of democratic rights? -- The taste that Hong Kong leaves behind will be the last taste of the Pax Britannica. -- And if they fail, and the people of Hong Kong remain to the end powerless to govern their own affairs, vulnerable to anything that may come out of China? Then the British will leave behind them, if not a sense of betrayal, at least a sense of disappointment. They will have missed the chance to give Hong Kong the one quality it has always lacked--nobility, the balance of purpose and proportion that the geomancers strive for. It's just a start in my education. It's always so. I learned that Hong Kong and "the new territories" were just a bunch of rocks. But people built there, first to sell opium, and later to sell bonds. It flourished so that countries and religions and governments would wink away the niceties of contradictions. As will champions today, who have something to sell.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-09-12 00:00:00 George Lin This book is a mix of history and some contemporary portraits of colonial Hong Kong. The book focuses almost exclusively on British personages and mundane colonial details and really never gets around to exploring the Chineseness. I was really disappointed by this. The book is also dated, curiously fixates on arcane and somewhat random details and quotes and does not shed much light on the actual people of Hong Kong (aside from the aristocracy and business elites). Barely got through it on my trip to Hong Kong and was constantly wishing I had a different book. A more balanced and nuanced history would make for a better travel read.