China Cuckoo review
Apr. 25th, 2009 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearMark Kitto is a columnist for Prospect, and his column is one of my favourite bits of the magazine. He's a Welshman living in China, who writes about the idiosyncracies of Chinese life in a very insightful and entertaining way. So, when I heard (from Prospect, of course) that he was bringing out a book about his life in China, I immediately put it on my wishlist.
China Cuckoo is an interesting mix of personal autobiography, politics and Chinese history. It's the first of those that I found most engrossing, but the rest was very well written too. China sounds at once enticing and terrifying, which is probably an accurate presentation of Kitto's experiences there - he was originally a magazine publisher in Shanghai, but now runs a coffee shop in a tiny mountain village called Moganshan. The tale of this progression is fascinating and Kitto is a very personable narrator.
China Cuckoo is an interesting mix of personal autobiography, politics and Chinese history. It's the first of those that I found most engrossing, but the rest was very well written too. China sounds at once enticing and terrifying, which is probably an accurate presentation of Kitto's experiences there - he was originally a magazine publisher in Shanghai, but now runs a coffee shop in a tiny mountain village called Moganshan. The tale of this progression is fascinating and Kitto is a very personable narrator.
