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Carregando... Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed Worldde Taras Grescoe
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Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. The star of the book is the city of Shanghai. The slightly lesser star is a young American lady Emily "Mickey" Hahn who decides to live much of her adult life there. She is a free spirit causing scandal by her close relationship with a married Chinese poet. Mickey has numerous jobs but her principle income is derived through writing magazine articles and publishing personal memoirs and novels about Asia. There is a great amount of research done here as well as a tremendous volume of information on Chinese history from 1850 to 1950. I was attracted to this book because of my fascination with journalist and author Emily (Mickey) Hahn, but the book’s scope reaches far beyond Hahn’s life in Shanghai before and during WWII and the communist revolution. The history of Shanghai is also included, giving the story more context, along with at least brief histories of various places around the world associated with the two other main personalities of the book--Victor Sassoon, who owned the hotel of the title, and Zau Sinmay, Emily Hahn’s Chinese lover. Many famous people, including Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Snow, and Mao Tse Tung, also make at least brief appearances in the narrative. It’s a compelling account of a fascinating time and place, but the writing style was a little long winded for my taste and I found myself skimming some of its pages and getting bogged down in others. I still enjoyed the book, and the personal research--I think calling it a quest doesn’t exaggerate--that author Taras Grescoe undertook to tell this history adds extra dimensions and insights that other books by and about Hahn leave out. sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
"On the eve of WWII, the foreign-controlled port of Shanghai was the rendezvous for the twentieth century's most outlandish adventurers, all under the watchful eye of the fabulously wealthy Sir Victor Sassoon. Emily 'Mickey' Hahn was a legendary New Yorker journalist whose vivid writing played a crucial role in opening Western eyes to the realities of life in China. At the height of the Depression, Hahn arrived in Shanghai after a disappointing affair with an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter, convinced she will never love again. After checking in to Sassoon's glamorous Cathay Hotel, Hahn is absorbed into the social swirl of the expats drawn to pre-war China, among them Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Harold Acton, and a colourful gangster named Morris 'Two-Gun' Cohen. But when she meets Zau Sinmay, a Chinese poet from an illustrious family, she discovers the real Shanghai through his eyes: the city of rich colonials, triple agents, opium-smokers, displaced Chinese peasants, and increasingly desperate White Russian and Jewish refugees--places her innate curiosity will lead her to explore first hand. Danger lurks on the horizon, though, as the brutal Japanese occupation destroys the seductive world of pre-war Shanghai, paving the way for Mao Tse-tung's Communists rise to power"-- Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Zau Sinmay was a handsome, cosmopolitan Chinese poet; Mickey Hahn was a beautiful and slightly outrageous American journalist: they met in Sir Victor Sassoon’s fabulous Cathay Hotel in 1936 and fell scandalously in love.
The personalities range from gangsters to Russian aristocrats, authors to spies, millionaire colonials to Jewish refugees, but most fascinating of all, is the seductive city of Shanghai. ( )