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Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire (Vintage Departures)

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Title: Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire (Vintage Departures)
by Jan Morris
ISBN: 0-679-77648-6
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Pub. Date: 01 January, 1997
Format: Paperback
Volumes: 1
List Price(USD): $15.00
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Average Customer Rating: 4 (6 reviews)

Customer Reviews

Rating: 4
Summary: If you are going to Hong Kong, read this first.
Comment: At least one of the reviewers on this list was unkind about the book, but I think it only fails, in the manner that all single-volume histories do, by trying to cover so much in so little. I have only read the unrevised 1990 Penguin paperback and only after I had already worked in Hong Kong in the early 90's. I wish I had read it before I went there, because it would have helped me to make sense of the total assault on the senses that HK is.
If you want, or need, to have more context than a guidebook will provide, this is where you will get it.

Rating: 2
Summary: Scattershot
Comment: If lace doilies could read, they'd love Jan Morris. Yes, she's a facile writer. Her sentences are at once both sinewy and elegant, and her book is rich with detail. However, reading Hong Kong by Jan Morris is like surveying the wreckage after a car bomb explodes a national archive. Miles of shelves have dumped their contents; and all the pages have been blown off their bookbindings. What remains are heaps of torched and scattered passages having little to no connection, except in catastrophic coincidence. To think of it another way, imagine learning animal husbandry by studying the floor of the butcher shop: odd scraps of meat, tangled ligaments, knotty tendons, and splattered blood. Collectively, they suggest "animal," but all the meaning and life has been stripped away. No one is going to learn to raise pigs that way. Similarly, I couldn't understand Hong Kong by reading Hong Kong. Perhaps I'm too harsh. Her book was neither a terrorist act nor even a massacre. In fact, at times her flowery writing is intoxicating. Nevertheless, I got the feeling that in her mind, Morris writes to seduce William F. Buckley, Jr., and that's just sick.

Rating: 4
Summary: Impressions of Hong Kong
Comment: I thought that this was a very readable, informative and entertaining portrait of Hong Kong. I can't attest to the book's accuracy as I've not yet visited Hong Kong, and it did feel a little out-of-date as the edition I had was written just prior to the British withdrawal in 1997. I can, therefore, only judge the book on how well it maintained my interest, which it did throughout.

Jan Morris uses a mixture of anecdotes, personal impressions and history: what the reader does not get is a straightforward history, nor a "travel book". Rather, it is a combination of both, and I thought that her method worked well, enabling her to make direct contrasts with the past, contextualising her impressions of the place.

As far as I could tell, Morris does not limit her examination - no parts of Hong Kong society are neglected. There is a good scattering of maps, which I found very useful. The photos in my edition could have been a bit less grainy though. But above all, I'm intrigued to know how an "electric ash tray" is supposed to operate (even though I don't smoke) and, more fascinating than that, what on earth an "electronic stud-finder" is supposed to be used for!!

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