6/26/2023 0 Comments Midnight in peking book![]() ![]() They wandered aimlessly, wondering what tomorrow would bring. This led to a city in turmoil:Ĭhinese Peking was bursting with peasants who had crowded in from the surrounding provinces, fleeing the Japanese, the warlords, poverty and natural disasters. ![]() The book's title is obviously meant to suggest John Berendt's massive 1994 bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but readers will find in French's book none of the annoying picaresque pandering that filled Berendt's story the more accurate comparison is Jonathan Spence's great 1978 The Death of Woman Wang.French wisely opens his book with a sweeping description of the perilous state of affairs in China at the time of his story, with the country on the brink of World War II and Peking itself nearly encircled by invading Japanese forces. French, a journalist and prolific expert on all things Chinese, has taken a footnote from nearly a century ago - the unsolved murder of British schoolgirl Pamela Werner in old Peking in January of 1937 - and used it as the focus of a tight little tour de force of fast-paced narrative and dogged research. ![]() ![]() Midnight in Peking by Paul FrenchPenguin Books, 2012Penguin Books begins a new thing with Paul French's sleek and riveting Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China - they commence a line of Penguin Hardcover Originals, and they could scarcely have chosen a better debut for the series. ![]()
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