Book reviews

Published on Friday 20 June 2008 19:59

THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF MODERN CHINA BY JONATHAN FENBY (Allen Lane, £30)

"HOLD High the Great Banner of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and Strive for New Victories in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects". The title of Paramount leader Hu Jintao's report to the Communist Party Congress in 2007 represents a new departure in revolutionary rhetoric, but then China's has been no ordinary revolution.

It was no more so in Mao's day than it has been in the era of the socialist market economy: those "Chinese Characteristics" are key. Unfailingly elegant, Fenby's study uncovers the elusive logic to 150 years of dramatic change, and looks beyond to the continuities of 4,000 years.

• Jonathan Fenby is at the Edinburgh book festival on 12 August.

BANDIT ROAD BY RICHARD GRANT (Little, Brown, 16.99)

SIERRA Madre? Sierra Macho, more like. Some alpha males may settle for tackling the hottest chilli on the menu; Richard Grant had to head for the fabled badlands of western Mexico. He found a sort of GQ-reader's utopia, a land of untrammelled testosterone, where men are not so much men as homicidal maniacs. They don't snort cocaine, they eat it, washing it down with beer; their tequila is pure alcohol; they rob, rape and smuggle drugs and lord knows what else. It isn't big or clever, perhaps, but it has to be admitted, the excitement's intoxicating. Altogether, this is one terrific read.

THE NEW HISTORY OF ORKNEY BY WILLIAM PL THOMSON (Birlinn, 9.99)

Islands are really only "isolated" in the context of a landlubber culture: in the Viking era, Orkney was a hub, a communication crossroads. This updated, third edition of a study first published to well-deserved acclaim in 1987, recaptures the bustling vigour and excitement of medieval life in a community that felt very much at the centre. Only gradually thereafter did what Thomson calls the '"end-of-the-line" mentality grow: even so, the sense of decline is easily exaggerated. But the 20th century did see steady depopulation: even the oil boom hasn't reversed that trend. Now Orkney stands at a crossroads of a different kind, though as Thomson points out, in a post-industrial, globalising era, its remoteness may not be the problem it once was.