The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China
The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China is a 2009 biography of Soong Mei-ling, wife of Kuomintang leader and President of the Republic of China Chiang Kai-shek written by Hannah Pakula. The book was widely reviewed as extensively researched and strongly put forward the argument that Madame Chiang and her husband have not been given the credit they deserve in shaping the modern Chinese nation. It has been translated into Chinese in two editions, one in Taiwan and one in Beijing, both by the same translator.
Pakula is also the author of biographies of
Synopsis
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Reception
The most extensive review was by
Seth Faison in the Los Angeles Times Book Review noted "a few factual errors and cultural slip-ups", found Pakula "tone-deaf to the subtleties of Chinese culture and history", and thought the title "The Last Empress" was inappropriate (calling Soong instead "the first and most influential first lady ever" of modern China).[5]
In The New Republic, Columbia professor Andrew J. Nathan, reviewing the book along with Jay Taylor's The Generalissimo,[6] observed that Chiang Kai-shek and his wife had been eulogized during the Second Sino-Japanese War but also denounced as "corrupt, venal, and weak." With these two biographies, he continued, the "wheel of historiography never stops turning. Both of the Chiangs have now come in for sympathetic reevaluations, each convincing in its way." After praising Taylor's research, he declares that although Pakula quotes occasionally from Chinese sources (evidently consulted through the offices of an assistant), her "immensely long book is mostly an assemblage of quotations from contemporary observers and later historians who wrote in English." What "seems to count" is "whether a story is fun to read." But he concludes that the book is "nevertheless hugely effortful and often enjoyable to read." Pakula "handles a complex cast of characters and a turbulent political environment with aplomb," and her account of personal matters probes more deeply than Taylor's.[7]
Translations
- 林添貴 (Lin Tiangui) (tr.) (2011). 宋美齡新傳 (Song Meiling Xin Zhuan). Taipei: Yuan liu chu ban shi ye gu fen you xian gong si. ISBN 9789573267522.
- 林添贵 Lin Tiangui (tr) (2012). 宋美龄传 (Song Meiling Zhuan). Beijing: Dong fang chu ban she. ISBN 9787506043571.
Notes
- ISBN 0907871917.
- ISBN 0684808188.
- ^ Jonathan D. Spence, "The Triumph of Madame Chiang," The New York Review of Books, February 25, 2010
- ^ Mirsky, Jonathan. "She Who Must Be Obeyed." The New York Times. November 27, 2009. Retrieved on April 7, 2011.
- ^ The Last Empress by Hannah Pakula (December 4, 2009)
- ISBN 9780674033382.
- ^ Andrew J. Nathan, "The Counter-Revolutionaries," The New Republic March 31, 2011 (accessed June 30, 2014).