Jonathan Fenby's "The Penguin History of Modern China"

Let's see... how to write a book report... well, this is a big book, lots of pages, oh something like 800+ pages...

The writing style is leaden. There was no sense of history as drama, as meaning pulled out of confusing facts, and no sense that this was more than a recital of dates, names, places, and facts. Sorry. This book just wasn't that rewarding.

Thank goodness for the maps and the short index of key figures. I kept flipping to these to locate places and figure out who this character was. I had hoped that I would walk away with a little geography and key personages engraved in my mind, but nope, just too many and they were presented in a way that let me hang onto them. This is the dull history that I remember from my schoolboy days.