Review by Choice Review
This is a marvelously lively account of Chinese wall building from the classic walls of tamped earth to today's "manicured tourist attraction" and China's Internet firewall. China's repeated, costly, and ultimately futile bouts of wall building are ably set into the changing historical contexts. The book tells the story of physical walls, but also of the Great Wall as modern image--fashioned in the French Enlightenment, transformed into a symbol of national resistance and pride, and now also into a brand name. Lovell (Cambridge) is a meticulous scholar who writes with rare wit and flair. Her words hit home, as when she describes Beijing's overbearing Forbidden City where "huge, heavy tiled roofs slipped, like oversized hats, over foreshortened walls, all seem groaning under the weight of their own self-importance." Her book presumes no background in Chinese studies, but can be read with benefit by specialists as a useful summary of current scholarship on a major aspect of Chinese history, and by neophytes as an introduction to China's interaction with the world beyond China. For everyone who enjoys a good read. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. C. Schirokauer Columbia University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Young British historian Lovell narrates the history of China's preeminent national symbol, its Great Wall. Dubious about its defensive efficacy, she points out the fortification's repeated failure to save the dynasty that built it. Apart from its physicality, Lovell is also intrigued by the wall as a metaphor for historical Chinese attitudes toward the exterior world. And driving her wonderful chronicle of the wall is her will to dispel visitors' impressions, shared alike by Richard Nixon and backpacking tourists, that the Great Wall is a continuous construction of great antiquity. Informing readers that though the earliest long walls do date to the Qin dynasty (about 220 BCE), the crenellated, watchtower-crowned marvel of today was built by Ming emperors in the 1600s. Along the way, Lovell instills an appreciation for how the Chinese self-conception of civilized superiority vis-a-vis raiding barbarians of the steppe induced periods of wall-building. Amounting to an overview of imperial and postimperial Chinese history, Lovell's account of the Great Wall is a supremely inviting entree to the country. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
There is no Great Wall of China, argues Lovell, who teaches Chinese history at Cambridge University. Instead, there are many Great Walls-physical, mental, cultural, military and economic-separating China from the outside world. The 4,300-mile-long wall is far more complex than any of the thousands of tourists taking a photo along its famous battlements realizes. Indeed, to the Chinese themselves, their wall has variously signified repression, freedom, security, vulnerability, cultural superiority, economic backwardness, imperial greatness and national humiliation. Still, myths about it abound. Far from it being unbreachable, Chinese emperors relied on the wall only as a last resort to fend off their enemies. (The Ming dynasty, for instance, found it useless against the victorious Manchus, who merely bribed the gatekeepers to let them in.) "As a strategy that has survived for more than two millennia," Lovell writes, "China's frontier wall is a monumental metaphor for reading China and its history, for defining a culture and a worldview...." Lovell tells the gripping, colorful story of the wall up to the present day, including a perceptive discussion of the "Great Firewall"-the Internet, which has replaced nomadic raiders as the most threatening of China's attackers. And no, you cannot see it from the Moon. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
For a long time in both China and the outside world, the Great Wall was the symbol of isolation, self-sufficiency, and arrogant tradition. But now that China has opened itself to the world (or "re-opened" itself, as it were), that stereotype no longer fits. A new understanding of China is needed, and historians have flocked to rethink historic foreign relations. With wide experience in contemporary China, Lovell (Chinese history & literature, Cambridge; trans., A Dictionary of Maqiao) tells the story of the wall as she shows how China was shaped over the course of 2000 years by interactions with Central Asia and the peoples of the steppe (she calls them barbarians, a term smacking of those old stereotypes). The opening chapter on the 18th- and 19th-century encounters with Britain does not reflect recent scholarly debates, but the terrific concluding chapter, "Great Wall, the Great Mall, and the Great Firewall," contains insightful personal observations on China's relations with the world today. Larger public libraries would do well to acquire this lively survey for curious readers with some knowledge of China.-Charles W. Hayford, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
