Liu Chiang-hsin is commonly known as the "Chinaman." He is a displaced victim of the Red Guard's attack, which killed his parents and have left him with severe emotional scars. One woman has managed to gain entry into his heart, and she has just been killed in what looks like a professional hit. Chinaman employs his considerable talents as a private detective, as well as calling in a few favors to exact vengeance for the murder of possibly the only woman he has ever loved. Unfortunately, two of the people he needs help from are his ex-wife and her cop father:

"Chinaman waited for the ominous silence to end while in the background ringing phones went unanswered at Manhattan Properties. When she spoke again, something new had crept into Mary Anne's voice. Something toxic. 'Let me get this straight. You put your other cases on hold to solve the death of the woman who destroyed our marriage and now you have the unmitigated nerve to call ME and ask for money? You want ME to loan you money?"

In spite of his propensity to innocently infuriate everyone around him, Chinaman is a lovable and tragic figure. He has much to teach us about East/West differences, and there is much about him that is honorable and noteworthy. Barrett writes a finely crafted mystery/suspense novel, with enough spy stuff to keep the reader rifling through the pages to see what is just around the corner. His denouement is excellent; set in Brooklyn's Red Hook area. What is most noteworthy about this tale, though, is the fact that ordinary, intelligent people are caught up in nefarious activities simply to make a living, and how easy it is to slip over the line into crime.

Shelley Glodowski
Reviewer

The book is a study of men in the Navy. They are far from the public eye, doing a job deemed essential by someone in Washington. They are essentially feared by the Chinese and despised by the American missionaries they come into contact with. It must have been a brutal emotional duty to carry out. Yet many men loved it. They spent their careers on the rivers and retired there when their time was up in the Navy.

Jake Holman, the central figure, is not better or worse than most other Sailors of that time. His motivation for joining the Navy were "...Army, Navy or reform school..." and so into the Navy he went. He is a competent machinest mate but has few real people skills. He is a loner on the outskirts of the Navy world. He has bounced from ship to ship and has now reached the end of the line. But even Holman makes friends in the ship as he tries to adapt to his surroundings.

It is an interesting look at the gunboat navy. The crew did military duties and drills but the day to day ship's husbandry were done by Chinese men. Is it any wonder the crew loved China duty once they got there.

One might say that the conclusion of the book is confusing and leaves you feeling troubled. Well it fits with the mission of the gunboat sailors and I think is perfect. Antiimperialists may condem the book and the subject but it was a real part of the American Navy and deserves to be remembered and respected.

And indeed this aspect of The Sand Pebbles is very well done. The whole book is worth reading just for one finely-crafted scene where the other sailors bet a foul-mouthed messmate he can't tell a story without cursing. He wins the bet, but on his own terms.

But there's more to this book then the lives a few seamen. It's about their interaction with the strange, wonderful Chinese civilization around them. And with China itself, which is, in a sense, the most important character in the book.

McKenna motivates this action by centering the book around an intelligent but half-educated hero, a rebellious man who joined the Navy to stay out of jail, and who transferred to the river patrol to escape from the hierarchy and rituals of ocean-going ships. Lacking his shipmates' contempt for the Chinese, he becomes fascinated with their lives and culture. This fascinatation become the source of many complicated interactions between him, his shipmates, and the Chinese, leading to friendship, love, conflict, and tragedy.

Another fascinating character is the boat's skipper, an aging Lieutenant Junior Grade. On one level, he is off-balance martinet, overly fond of military ritual, striving to achieve a strange personal state of grace -- with disasterous results. But he's also a keen observer of the events and people around him, and his inner conversations about them make for compelling reading.

Most people know this story from the Steve McQueen movie, which reduced all the complexity of McKenna's story to Vietnam-era historical guilt tripping. A pity, because this book contains much insight about the interaction between China and the west, an interaction to often reduced to simple political cliches.

Some of the appeal for me comes in identifying with Jake Holman. Where Jake begins with a love of machinery and an empowering mastery of it, I suppose to some part I originally felt the same way about computers and software. Jake transcends this, albeit tragically, in the book. Will you?

My one criticism is the lack of historical thread of the airline after its ejection from China. The book breaks down to a series of interesting anecdotes, but the background on how CAT evolved, how it acquired jets, how Smith himself transitioned to sophisticated jet transports, is missing. I found many of the later anecdotes, though well written and compelling, oddly out of context, and wondered how they fitted into the big picture. This wasn't helped by Smith's technique of sometimes mentioning a character, and only introducing him in later pages, which has you thumbing back through the book seeing if perhaps you'd missed a passage.

But these are small criticisms indeed, and the book is a very enjoyable read of a turbulent and, frankly, romantic era of aviation.

Felix Smith isn't a historian. He's a pilot--a good one, since he survived 23 years with Civil Air Transport, organized to carry relief supplies around postwar China, only to become a paramilitary arm of Chiang Kai-shek's campaign against communism.

To our great good fortune, Smith also turns out to be a gifted reporter. Better than anyone else, he evokes the sights, smells, and sounds of China in 1945, along with an economy so weak that U.S. dollars were precious enough to be washed and ironed after use, and a government so depraved that it's a wonder it lasted until 1949.

China Pilot is a a wonderful book. It belongs on the shelf of every admirer of Chennault and his unorthodox air forces.

Mike McCaffrey
Department of State/Foreign Service - Retired

The translator starts off with a very interesting introduction probably longer than the book itself; while a little boring at times, it was a very necessary addition. He explains to the reader the history of the various finds that have gone towards completing the text, the structure of the text, the historical background and anecdotes of Sun-Tzu, compares fundamental western beliefs and mindsets to eastern, and generally just analyzes this work and puts it into perspective for the reader.

As for Sun-Tzu's work itself -- it's great. If you read it carefully, you'll be surprised to not how much of this stuff you already know, how much is simply common sense -- but the format and presentation and conciseness of it is astounding. It presents the material in an accessible way that's understandable and readable. Also including here, alongside the initial 13 chapters, are all kinds of Art of Warfare fragments which have been unearthed, most of which are pretty interesting.

This book is a must read if you are at all interesting in war or the context thereof.

This book tells the story of a village and the marines and militia who defended it during the Vietnam War. It is filled with first hand accounts of fast paced fire-fights and battalion-sized battles. The action is riveting, and the story is endearing and heart-wrenching. A squad of marines and platoon of PF militia men fight night-after-night against local guerillas, and at times, VC main force battalions. The Americans become members of the village, eat in families' homes, play with their children, attend weddings, funerals, and holiday festivities. Their emotional ties hearten them, motivate them, and ultimately betray them.

The book was written by Francis J. West, a marine officer and RAND Corporation researcher sent to the village in the late 1960's to study its marine defenders. The marine squad -- seldom numbering more than a dozen -- was known throughout the Marine Corps. It encountered communist units more often than any other unit in the Corps; its members often fought twenty to thirty engagements a month, more than most U.S. battalions.

I've recommended this book to several men in the military, including my brother, a captian in the 10th SF group. All of them, in turn, recommended it to their friends, commanders, and subordinates.

"The Village" is as good as "Bravo Two Zero," "A Bright Shining Lie," and "We Were Soldiers Once, and Young." You won't put this book down until you're finished, and then, you'll read it again and again and give copies to your friends for Christmas.

Other books seem to have explanations that will make the student feel better, this book has translations that are less pleasing, but perhaps more honest. I look at this translation as an introduction to physics of the spirit.

That being said, this is still a good introduction. If you are clueless about Chinese history, this book serve as a great start. If you know anything more than the fundamentals, however, look elsewhere for information.

1) First, the dynasties in chronological order: Zhou, Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Lio, Jin, Yuan, Ming, Qing.

2) Zhou (770-240BC) is an era of constant warfare and power struggles. Confucius and Lao-tzu (creator of Daoism) are born during this period. Their writings have an enormous impact on Eastern thought and governance. The famous terracotta warrors also date back to Zhou.

3) Qin (221-206BC) and Han (202BC-220AD). This is the start of China as an empire. (pg 60) Trate routes reach all the way to Turkey, The population is 58M in 2AD (slightly larger than contemporary Rome). The great wall starts construction.

4) Tang (581-907) unifies what is now considered modern China.
They link Northern and Southern China by huge canals and inter-regional trade floursihed. Chang'an becomes the world's largest city. Culture and the arts start to thrive.

5) Song (907-1276) is not able to control East Asia like Tang or Han. They broker deals with neighboring states for a shaky peace. The status quo continues. By the 11th century, China is outpacing Europe in terms of "agricultural productivity, industrial technology, and sophistication of commercial organization." (161)

6) Ghengis Khan (1162-1227) creates huge lightning force of calvary that eventually covers 2/3 of Asian continent. Some of the cities under his (and grandson's) control: Beijing, Lhasa, Moscow, Kiev, Ormuz, and Baghdad. The divisions between Mongol ruling class and Chinese are kept clear by law, status, and language. The Chinese resent this alien rule.

7) Ming (1368-1644) is founded by Taizu, who is was the first commoner to become emperor in 1,500 years. (191) The population continues to grow, but the country is not entirely under control. Mongols attack from the North, while the Japanese attack from the east.

8) Manchus (1644-1900) from Manchuria (east of Mongolia, above Korea) create the Qing dynasty. They govern efficiently. They force their subjects to adopt the Manchu hairstyle (shaved heads with braided hair in the back) as a symbol of their loyalty. Trade with Europe increases exponentially. By 1800, Europe was buying 1/7 of all Chinese tea. This eventually leads to the Opium wars. Various colonial powers all vy for a piece of China.

9) Sun Yatsen, Chang Kaishek, Mao Zedong round out the rest of this beautifully illustrated book.

As she vividly describes her childhood in Communist China, her poverty and famine and cruel government policies, I couldn't help but trace my own life events and be painfully aware of the blessings I've received in comparison to her life lived under vise-grip pressures of a government not concerned for its own people. As I read about her eating pancakes made of tree leaves and sleeping through school in the afternoons because of her weakness from hunger, I pictured myself going door-to-door to collect money in milk cartons for the "starving children in China" and now I've been introduced to the first-person story of one of those children.

This book helped me to put a very human face on the stories I've read in the newspaper and studied in history classes. I am a deeply pro-life woman, and yet I can fully empathize with women in China who are forced to submit to abortion because of the relentless, crushing pressure experienced on a daily basis by the women of that country by a government committed to a one-child policy at any cost, which is so graphically explained in this book. Reading it makes me ask myself how strong I could be under the same circumstances.

You will not be able to forget her descriptions of her C-section done without anesthesia because of her desire to avoid the dangers the anesthesia posed to her unborn son, and to admire her courage and the deep mother-love that drove her to do so. And even when she becomes a birth control worker who imprisons and berates and forcibly aborts other women (even her best friend, in labor at full term), you cannot see this woman as a monster herself, but as part of a monstrous system that must be exposed and changed.

This book may change your understanding of abortion forever and make you more committed than ever to ending its destructive power in a very pro-woman way. It will most surely challenge excuses for UNFPA funding of these policies in China. Thank you Chi An, for telling your story!

This is one of the best books I have ever read. I could not put it down. It gave me an understanding of communism from an individual's perspective. This in turn gave me even more appreciation for my country and my freedom. This book is so compelling and reads so easily. I was able to understand and trace the events in China's history that have led them to where they are today developmentally. I don't believe their problems are caused by overpopulation.

As the mother of a daughter adopted from China, it has given me a heart for the woman who gave birth to my daughter. I know how dangerous it was for her to hide this baby. It would have been easier for her to abort. She may have even received incentives had she done so. But she chose to give her baby a chance at life. How I wish she could know her baby is safe! Another great read on this subject is: Lost Daughters of China.

I have a Ph.D. in History, so the first part of the book, the history part, was relatively easy to get through, even though there were a lot of unfamiliar names in unfamiliar languages. The author keeps the number of names one needs to remember to a minimum.

The second half of the book is about the doctrines. It is a gem beyond compare!! It is succinct, there is no mystification added by the author to skip over things he does not himself understand, and it is to the point. These three are rare in the field.

This could be a text, but I think it is better thought of as a "home companion." Beyond a doubt, Grieg has mastered the unmasterable and spoken the ineffable.