Rating: 
Summary: An absorbing read
Review: I found Dong's "Shanghai" a thoroughly engaging read. My grandmother grew up in Shanghai and used to tell us the most amazing stories about the people she knew. There was, for instance, the matriarch of one of the "best" Sephardic Jewish families in town (they got their start importing opium into Shanghai from Bahgdad) who ran a whorehouse on the side. My grandmother says that the matriarch even worked in the establishment. One of her sons--went on to write a wonderful book about his youth in that storied Oriental City, "A Place in Time." Reading Dong's history of this many-sided city reminded me of stories I had heard from older family members and also brings to mind that axiom that "truth is stranger than fiction." My only qualm with this otherwise excellent book is Dong's obvious disttate of towards Chiang Kai-shek's government, his wife and the members of the Soong family. Well, they weren't perfect but at least they weren't Communists.
Rating: 
Summary: Extensive overview of a fascinating city
Review: I had the opportunity of attending a lecture and slide show the author of this book gave on Shanghai recently at the Elmhurst library in Queens. It was an absolutely riveting talk. For an entire hour, Stella Dong transported us into another world. We were shown slides of Shanghai from its beginnings as a treaty port until the Communists entered in 1949. But it was more than history that we absorbed--we had a sense of the time and place. As a result of the talk, I bought the book,read it and can vouch for "Shanghai's" living up to the city it's eponymous subject. One big disappointment, though, is that the paperback doesn't have photos in it. All the same, Stella Dong conjures up the spirit of Shanghai in its glory days with such vivacity that the photos would only be an appetizer.
Rating:
Summary: Lively and evocative history
Review: I had the opportunity of attending a lecture and slide show the author of this book gave on Shanghai recently at the Elmhurst library in Queens. It was an absolutely riveting talk. For an entire hour, Stella Dong transported us into another world. We were shown slides of Shanghai from its beginnings as a treaty port until the Communists entered in 1949. But it was more than history that we absorbed--we had a sense of the time and place. As a result of the talk, I bought the book,read it and can vouch for "Shanghai's" living up to the city it's eponymous subject. One big disappointment, though, is that the paperback doesn't have photos in it. All the same, Stella Dong conjures up the spirit of Shanghai in its glory days with such vivacity that the photos would only be an appetizer.
Rating:
Summary: A colorful and accurate picture of a great city
Review: I knew the Shanghai that Stella Dong describes as a child and adolescent growing up there. She captures the surreal quality of this unique world amazingly well. Reading "Shanghai" brought it all back--the "sweetly-sick" odor of opium in the side streets, the blind beggars and the gangsters who used to knock on the door of our house in the French Concession for "protection money." What I especially like is Dong's even-handedness. She writes about this Chinese city from neither a purely Western nor a Chinese point-of-view. This is the best of the books available about Shanghai. I hope everyone interested in exploring China's recent past will read this book because they'll learn a great deal about the forces that shaped China today from understanding the underpinnings of this astonishing place.
Rating: 
Summary: Huge disappointment
Review: I read this book while spending a few weeks in Shanghai recently, and it was torture to wade through Dong's turgid, overblown writing. What is most disappointing is that this could have been an absolutely fascinating book, but in Dong's inept hands, the history of Shanghai is rendered dull and academic. A truly dreadful book.
Rating:
Summary: A Fascinating History of a Notorious City
Review: I was fascinated by Stella Dong's book "Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City." I lived in Shanghai for almost ten years prior to, during, and after the Second World War and wrote about that experience ("Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai"). Despite that, I was surprised by how little I knew about the history of this turbulent city and how much I learned from Ms. Dong's volume. The book is encyclopedic about the history of Shanghai from 1842-1949, a tumultuous period including the opium war, the boxer rebellion, the two World Wars, the rise and fall of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist movement, and the ultimate virtual surrender of the city to the communists.Readers will profit from the voluminous research that went into the preparation of this well written account of what was widely known as an open city where those with the interest and resources could avail themselves of anything they fancied, legal or illegal. Ms. Dong has approached this task with the energy of a historian and apparently read virtually all the available sources on Shanghai. More importantly for the average reader, this voluminous research is not written in the dry scholarly manner of some historians. Instead the book is prepared much the way a journalist would write an exciting expose of the city and its inhabitants. Among these are the gangsters and politicians, and Ms. Dong points out that both terms often apply to the same individuals, the opium dealers, as well as the inhabitants and owners of numerous brothels residing in Shanghai. Readers will get glimpses of a range of fascinating characters inhabiting Shanghai at various times from Ho-Chi Minh, Chou En-Lai, members of the Sassoon family, to different groups of refugees finding safe haven in this turbulent city. The book holds the interest of average readers while providing an overview of the history of both Shanghai and China more generally, its Chinese and foreign inhabitants, as well as the widespread corruption and vices of this fascinating city that has a well deserved reputation for notoriety.
Rating:
Summary: A lively and illuminating urban history
Review: I was initially leery of this book, but Dong's contribution to the growing body of literature about Shanghai is well worth reading. I thought I already knew a lot about the city before dipping into this new history, but Dong opened my eyes. The author shows exactly how wide the gap between the haves and have-nots was in China, why Shanghai was both a trap and a beacon of opportunity for its many citizens. She show show the city acquired its well-deserved reputation for notoriety: she exploicates the role of the Chinese criminal societies and expertly delineates the role of the opium trade in shaping the early port. The book is chock full of riveting stories--as any true history should be.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely compulsive reading
Review: I've always been fascinated by old Shanghai, but Stella Dong's book is incomparable in the way it makes the city come alive. There's more vivid detail than I would have imagined any one writer could assemble, and it's presented in an absorbing, entertainingly-written book. For anyone wanting to get a picture of a truly decadent, corrupt and deliciously nasty city (as it was in its heyday), this is the book to read.
Rating:
Summary: Old Shanghai Comes Alive
Review: In this handsomely designed work, Stella Dong presents a colorful picture of the world's liveliest city in its pre-Communist days. In her energetic style she takes the reader on a tour of Shanghai from its humble beginnings to its apex as the pleasure capital of the world to its rapid decline after World War II. With great attention to detail, Ms. Dong uncovers every aspect of this once-great city from politics to entertainment, from the meanest beggar to the wealthiest entrepreneur. She writes with understanding of all the machinations which combined to create the modern Xanadu known as Shanghai. It's a pity both the city as it was and the book had to end.
Rating:
Summary: Third rate nonsense.
Review: It's hard to say what is worse, Stella Dong's third rate prose or her weak grasp of Chinese history. Her explanation of the causes of the Opium war are nothing more than a condemnation of the West for exporting opium to China. Unfortunately she makes no mention of the fact that opium was also legal in Britain at the time, was legal in China at the time for medicinal purposes, and was actively traded and consumed by Chinese since roughly the 7th century AD. Not to mention the myriad non-opium related factors leading to the war such as anti-foreign riots and an insistence on foreign envoys prostrating themselves on the ground in front of the emperor. You should look into books by Jonathan Spence (who incidentally has an excellent writing style and is a Professor of History at Yale, unlike Dong, who is barely literate and posesses no noteworthy education) which also highlight the decadence of Chinese cities but on a much more sophisticated level.
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