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the complete review - biography

The Man Who Loved China
(Bomb, Book and Compass)

by
Simon Winchester

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : fascinating life, breezy introduction

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "More straightforward than some of Winchester’s idiosyncratic recent books, such as his 2005 study of the 1906 California earthquake, The Man Who Loved China does justice to Needham’s impressive accomplishments. But what serves Winchester best is his appreciation clearly of a piece with Needham’s own -- of China’s true place in the world." - Bryan Walsh, Bookforum
  
  
• "The Man Who Loved China has a breathless quality. The land that Needham loved is vast -- as are his own accomplishments. Readers travel at warp speed to reach the end of such a career in less than 300 pages of text. Perhaps as a result, we see Needham in action -- constantly -- but we learn surprisingly little of his interior." - Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor
  
  
• "Mr Winchester draws much from Needham’s diaries which describe an unconventional lifestyle, an open marriage and numerous extra-marital affairs, as well as exotic adventures travelling across China in search of its science." - The Economist
  
  
• "The Man Who Loved China is an offbeat character study, not a regurgitation of the nation's history, but because Winchester (The Professor and the Madman) is such a fantastic storyteller, you emerge with a clearer picture of a mysterious country." - Gregory Kirschling, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "(T)hough he’s good at quick character sketches, Winchester does not probe his subjects’ psychology as deeply as one might like. But he tells his story engagingly, and this is a salutary reminder of the singular achievements of the Chinese -- as well as of the perils of Eurocentrism." - Henry Hitchings, Financial Times
  
  
• "Winchester tells the story with colourful enthusiasm and Needham is a compendious subject, sympathetically treated with the help of the scholar's copious notes, letters and diaries. He remains an enigmatic character, however, and the key figures in his life rarely acquire substance for the reader. A little more of their insight might have helped us understand the astonishing scholar who was Joseph Needham." - Isabel Hilton, New Statesman
  
  
• "It was a bold idea of Simon Winchester's to try to tell the two stories, one intimate and the other intricate, to a wide general audience, and I was initially skeptical that the attempt could succeed. But I feel that he has pulled it off, and drawn the reader into several disparate worlds at once. Sometimes, I feel, all three of the leading protagonists resist Winchester's attempts at interpretation, but he cannot be blamed for that." - Jonathan D. Spence, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "Simon Winchester’s biography, The Man Who Loved China, presents a low-key, often beguiling view of a man who hardly beguiled the postwar American authorities -- or, for a time, his own countrymen. (...) Winchester has spent a good deal of his career as a journalist in East Asia, so it’s not surprising that the liveliest stretch of his narrative presents Needham’s first encounter with the country whose language he had mastered from afar." - Alida Becker, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "The finest sections of Winchester's book describe the excursions Needham made to the further reaches of China, ostensibly goodwill trips, but really as a way of gathering data for the book that would become Science and Civilisation in China. Here we see Needham at his most intrepid and eccentric, a sort of Waugh character by way of Indiana Jones." - Andrew Anthony, The Observer
  
  
• "In The Man Who Loved China, Winchester hits the eccentricity jackpot. (...) (A)n enjoyable, breezy read, well suited for reading on the chaise longue, gin-and-tonic in hand. But there is also a telling, unresolved paradox running through Winchester's tale. After an early and hugely successful career as a biochemist, capped off by being named a member of the ultra-prestigious Royal Society at the tender age of 41, Needham devoted the remainder of his life to, on the one hand, documenting how technologically far ahead China had been for millennia when compared to the West, and on the other hand, striving to understand why Europe suddenly jumped in front -- a monumental tectonic shift that dominates the reality of globalization to this day." - Andrew Leonard, Salon
  
  
• "(A)dmirably readable (.....) But while Winchester’s breezy narrative abounds in human detail, it tends to want depth. Although a notable improvement on its main precursor, a terse Unesco publication by Maurice Goldsmith, it is still too short to be more than an entertaining primer." - Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times
  
  
• "Winchester does have a tendency to hyperbole (.....) There is also a nagging tree-falls-in-the-forest question, namely, if Needham's fame and work has faded in such a short time since his death in 1994, how true can it be that his work fundamentally altered our collective understanding of China's central role in human history. (...) (W)e are left in the end with one man's graceful, diverting account of another man's passion, and that has its own worth." - Zachary Karabell, The Times
  
  
• "This is the rare book where you wish the author had included more detail, not less. Needham was a complicated man, and few topics are more complex than China. In skillfully keeping his narrative from bogging down, Winchester ends with a book that feels a touch thin." - Deirdre Donahue, USA Today
  
  
• "Despite Winchester's extraordinary narrative skills, he gets some details wrong. (...) In retelling Needham's story, Winchester focuses on the inventiveness of the Chinese people, whose creativity once surpassed that of all other civilizations. If this resourcefulness can be renewed and harnessed in the service of sustainability, then perhaps there is hope not only for China but for the planet." - Judith Shapiro, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Man Who Loved China of the (American) title is Joseph Needham, the British scholar behind Science and Civilisation in China which Simon Winchester (accurately) describes as:

a vastly important monument of scholarship, an undertaking which, when completed, would rival James Murray's Oxford English Dictionary and Leslie Stephen's Dictionary of National Biography as among the greatest intellectual accomplishments of all time.

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Links:

• Harper Collins publicity page

• Bookforum
• Boston Globe
• Christian Science Monitor
• Daily Californian
• The Economist
• Entertainment Weekly
• Financial Times
• New Statesman
• The Observer
• The Oregonian
• Seattle Times
• Toronto Star
• Sunday Times
• The Times
• USA Today
• Vancouver Sun
• The Washington Post

• Needham Research Institute
• Science and Civilisation in China - Cambridge University Press publicity pages

• Simon Winchester site

• The Alice behind Wonderland
• Krakatoa
• The Meaning of Everything
• The Professor and the Madman (also: The Surgeon of Crowthorne)

• George Steiner's My Unwritten Books, one of which was on Joseph Needham
• See Index of Biographical works under review
• See Index of books about Science and Technology
• See Index of Books on Books and Publishing, and Bibliographies
• See Index of Travel-related books

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About the Author:

       English author Simon Winchester works as a journalist and has written a multitude of books.

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© 2008-2011 the complete review

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