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 新书，最后的皇后，写宋美龄，英文版，准备买来看看，好长，差不多800页。昨天 |
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ceo/cfo
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作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
花姐日报和纽约时报都有书评，转一下：
Wartime China’s Elegant Enigma
Single Page
“The only thing Oriental about me,” Soong Mei-ling once wrote, “is my face.” 哈哈，全盘西化，鄙视一下 
Associated Press
Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, right, with Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House.
THE LAST EMPRESS
Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China
By Hannah Pakula
Illustrated. 787 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35.
Related
Excerpt: ‘The Last Empress’ (November 4, 2009)
Sigrid Estrada
Hannah Pakula
Soong Mei-ling, better known to history as Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, was exaggerating only slightly. Chinese by birth, American by education and cultural inclination, she was a seductive blend of both societies; for a time, no woman in the world was more powerful.
Mme. Chiang led a long, vastly complicated life, one that is richly detailed in “The Last Empress,” Hannah Pakula’s long, vastly complicated new biography. Ms. Pakula’s book is a yeoman work of historical research, with fact grinding against fact. It is also a monotonous piece of storytelling, one that has little pliancy or narrative push. Its 681 pages of text are at times as grueling as a forced march across the Mongolian steppe.
The story of Mme. Chiang’s life has lost none of its strange, piquant appeal, however. Born in Shanghai in 1898, she was the daughter of a peasant who had gone to America at age 12 and found work on ships and in printing shops. Her father, Charlie Soong, eventually graduated from Vanderbilt University and returned to China at 20, where he had six children and became rich publishing Bibles. He raised Soong Mei-ling and her siblings to appreciate almost everything Western, including mattresses (soft), food (American) and religion (Methodist).
Cutting against the grain of a staunchly patriarchal society, Mr. Soong expected big things from his daughters as well as from his sons. Soong Mei-ling’s two older sisters traveled to the United States to attend Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Ga. Soong-Mei-ling arrived in America at age 10, studying at a boarding school in New Jersey and a public school in Georgia before graduating from Wellesley College.
When she arrived at Wellesley in 1913, Ms. Pakula writes, Soong Mei-ling could lay on a “Scarlett O’Hara accent” she’d picked up in Georgia. (“Ah reckon Ah shan’t stay aroun’ much longer,” she reportedly told the freshman dean.) She was also, Ms. Pakula writes, “short, chubby, round-faced and childish in appearance, with a short haircut and bangs over her eyes that did nothing for her looks.”
By the time she left Wellesley, however, there was a sense of destiny about Soong Mei-ling. “She had not been given a Western education,” Ms. Pakula observes, “in order to spend her afternoons at the mah-jongg table.”
The Soong sisters married well. One, Soong Qing-ling, married Sun Yat-sen, China’s first president after the last emperor was overthrown in 1911. In a lavish ceremony in 1927, Soong Mei-ling married one of Sun’s former military aides, Chiang Kai-shek, a man who would become the head of the Nationalist government in China from 1928 to 1949, and later its leader while in exile in Taiwan.
He was a hardened soldier who “dressed simply in a plain cotton uniform with straw sandals,” Ms. Pakula writes, and neither drank nor smoked. Mme. Chiang was by now thin, glamorous and wore form-fitting clothes. Barely five feet tall, she had, Ms. Pakula declares, “a near-hypnotic effect on men.”
Because Chiang Kai-shek spoke virtually no English, Mme. Chiang became his de facto translator and the face China turned to the Western world. She wrote articles about China for The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly in the early ’40s. She appeared on “Meet the Press” in 1958. She was Chiang’s closest adviser and she constantly buffed his — and the country’s — rough edges.
The pair were seen as a modernizing influence in China; Time magazine named them Man and Woman of the Year in 1938. The peak of Mme. Chiang’s fame arrived in 1943, when she toured America in support of the Nationalist Chinese cause against Japan.
During that tour she was the first private citizen to address the Senate and the House of Representatives, and in Los Angeles she gave a speech to a packed Hollywood Bowl. (While in America, Ms. Pakula suggests, Mme. Chiang continued a romantic involvement she had begun earlier with Wendell Willkie, the Republican who had lost the 1940 election to Franklin D. Roosevelt.)
Chiang Kai-shek’s government, increasingly besieged by China’s Communist Party as the 1940s went on, was also rotting from within. He was a ruthless, petty man and a dismal leader. As Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby observed, “The manners of the Kuomintang” — the Nationalist Party — “in public were perfect; its only faults were that its leadership was corrupt, its secret police merciless, its promises lies, and its daily diet the blood and tears of the people of China.”
Eleanor Roosevelt got a chilling glimpse of Mme. Chiang’s own dark side when Mrs. Roosevelt asked her how she would deal with a difficult labor leader like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. “She never said a word,” Ms. Roosevelt wrote, “but the beautiful, small hand came up and slid across her throat.”
Illustrated. 787 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35.
Related
Excerpt: ‘The Last Empress’ (November 4, 2009) Chiang Kai-shek and his wife were forced into exile in Taiwan after the Communist victory in 1949; he presided for decades over Nationalist politics from there. After his death, in 1975, Mme. Chiang moved to New York City, where she led a reclusive life, dying in 2003 at 105. She had no children. Her husband had contracted venereal disease before their marriage, Ms. Pakula writes, and was probably sterile.
“The Last Empress” bogs down in overly long discursions into the intricacies of China’s political history. Indeed, Mme. Chiang’s own story often recedes far into the background. But Ms. Pakula’s book comes alive in its pepperings of telling detail about Mme. Chiang’s chaotic life.
Ms. Pakula notes the way Mme. Chiang loved to deploy esoteric words (“indehiscence,” “ochlocracy”) in her speeches in English, sending reporters scrambling for their dictionaries. She observes that President Harry S. Truman, tired of Mme. Chiang’s appeals for money, began to refer to her husband as “Cash My-check.”
She details Mme. Chiang’s final years at 10 Gracie Square, an elegant apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There she kept three dogs (two bichons and a Yorkshire terrier) and employed 24 servants. There were reports that neighbors complained about the cooking odors and cockroaches in her 18-room apartment, and that Mme. Chiang kept a closet filled with gold bars.
Ms. Pakula is also the author of “The Last Romantic: A Biography of Queen Marie of Roumania” (1985) and “An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick: Daughter of Queen Victoria, Wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, Mother of Kaiser Wilhelm” (1997). She views Mme. Chiang’s life with interest and occasionally, when warranted, with sympathy. She is clearly in agreement with Eleanor Roosevelt, who summed up Mme. Chiang’s striding performance on the world stage by remarking that while she could “talk beautifully about democracy,” she did “not know how to live democracy.”
花姐日报的，
中国神秘之女
By MELANIE KIRKPATRICK
There was a time in the history of modern China when one of Mao Zedong's favorite proverbs, "women hold up half the sky," could have been amended to the singular: "A woman holds up half the sky." That woman, Soong May-ling, was the wife of Mao's bitter rival and better known by her married name, Madame Chiang Kai-shek. To virtually everyone in her orbit, she was simply "Madame."
In 1937, when Chiang Kai-shek's influence as the leader of China's Nationalist government was at its peak, Life magazine called Madame the "most powerful woman in the world." Liberty magazine described her as "the real brains and boss of the Chinese government." Clare Boothe Luce compared her, without a hint of hyperbole, to Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale. Ernest Hemingway, who had lunch with Madame in 1941 in the wartime capital Chongqing, called her the "empress" of China. That's the appellation that Hannah Pakula has appropriated for the title of her entertaining, though overlong, biography, "The Last Empress."
Soong May-ling was born in Shanghai in 1898, the youngest of what came to be known as the "fabled" Soong sisters. The girls were educated in the U.S.—Madame majored in English at Wellesley—and all married well. Ai-ling became the wife of financier H.H. Kung; Ching-ling's husband was Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Republic of China; and May-ling in 1927 wed Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the man who would soon unify a fractious China but ended up losing the country to the Communists and decamping to Taiwan in 1949. The usual rap on the sisters is that Ai-ling loved money, Ching-ling loved China and May-ling loved power.
To judge from "The Last Empress," that's about right, though Ms. Pakula is not without empathy for her subject. In her telling, the young May-ling was a woman in search of herself in a traditional society that valued women only as wives and the mothers of sons. Back home in Shanghai after Wellesley, Ms. Pakula writes, May-ling was "part society belle, part would-be reformer," attending all the chic parties and using her charm to raise funds for the YMCA and other charities. But May-ling "had not been given a Western education in order to spend her afternoons at the mah-jongg table." She decided to re-invent herself by hooking onto the star of Chiang Kai-shek.
Madame had a ruthless streak, and Ms. Pakula describes how she managed to "compartmentalize" her mind, overlooking facts that she would prefer not to face when they stood in the way of a cherished goal. In the case of her marriage, Madame, a staunch Methodist, had to convince herself (and her mother) that Chiang, who already had two wives when they met in 1926, was free to marry her. (Chiang obliged by sending his second wife to America and denying the validity of his first marriage.) During their life together, Madame overlooked the generalissimo's numerous faults as a military and political leader, such as his preference for fighting the Communists instead of the invading Japanese and his tendency to ignore the suffering of the Chinese people, who ultimately revolted against him. She overlooked, too, the immense corruption of his Nationalist Party, whose fortunes were based in part on the opium trade.
Over time, Madame became Chiang's closest foreign-policy adviser and translator. She took care to soften the messages delivered by Washington emissaries during World War II, many of them seeking a level of support in the war against Japan that Chiang was unwilling to provide. "The Last Empress" is also the story of how Americans went ga-ga over Madame during the war. Her eight-month visit to the U.S. in 1943 to raise aid for her homeland would be the envy of any modern-day PR person. She wrote countless articles, addressed both houses of Congress, and wowed crowds at Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall. Her greatest achievement was as a propagandist, persuading Congress and the American public that her husband could deliver a democratic China.
The Last Empress
By Hannah Pakula
Simon & Schuster, 787 pages, $35
Ms. Pakula doesn't stint on stories about Madame's opulent lifestyle—the diamond buttons, trunkloads of furs and scores of servants. "The Last Empress" also offers examples of Madame's "near-hypnotic effect on men," including FDR's 1940 challenger for the presidency, Wendell Willkie, with whom Ms. Pakula believes she had an affair. It may have been true love, but then again, maybe not. Willkie's friend, Mike Cowles, reports that Madame once told him that if Willkie had won the presidency in 1944 (she believed that he would be nominated again), then "he and I would rule the world. I would rule the Orient and Wendell would rule the Western world." Ah, romance.
"The Last Empress" has one almost-unforgivable fault: a canvas so vast that it dwarfs its subject. The book's subtitle is "Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China," but it really ought to be phrased the other way around. There are chapters-long digressions about Sun Yat-sen, warlords, the Japanese, the Communists. Ms. Pakula writes like a dream, and her narrative is certainly a pleasure to read; anyone who wants to learn about China in the first half of the 20th century will find "The Last Empress" a good guide. But it is really two books in one.
Ms. Pakula also ducks the central question about Madame: Was she a Dragon Lady, interested mainly in increasing her power and enriching her family's fortunes? Or did she, like her left-wing sister Ching-ling, love China and believe that the best way to show that love was to save her country from the evils of communism? Was she "God's masterpiece," as the family minister described her at the time of her death in 2003 at the age of 106? Or was she "the most evil woman to wield power" in the 20th century, as one Taipei paper put it? After nearly 800 pages, "The Last Empress" doesn't say. Madame Chiang Kai-shek remains as enigmatic as ever.
Ms. Kirkpatrick is a former deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.
作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 新书，最后的皇后，写宋美龄，英文版，准备买来看看，好长，差不多800页。昨天 -- ceo/cfo - (13785 Byte) 2009-11-05 周四, 22:30 (2359 reads)
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