Rating: 
Summary: Good concept, flawed execution
Review: Almost every review I see here speaks of Winchester's eloquent storytelling ability, but I cannot agree. I found the subject/trip to be obscured by his rather repetitive and cliched use of descrption. Winchester attempts to enshroud his subject in heaps of magical and varied descriptive prose - but, being no Amis or Twain, he invariably misses the mark. As keen as I am on the subject, I couldn't finish this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Another point of view
Review: Almost every review I see here speaks of Winchester's eloquent storytelling ability, but I cannot agree. I found the subject/trip to be obscured by his rather repetitive and cliched use of descrption. Winchester attempts to enshroud his subject in heaps of magical and varied descriptive prose - but, being no Amis or Twain, he invariably misses the mark. As keen as I am on the subject, I couldn't finish this book.
Rating: 
Summary: An absorbing read
Review: An absorbing and interesting book about travel up the Yangtze. Not your average, bland, travel narrative. A lot of research has gone into this book to make it a fascinating read. Well worth reading if you are even the slightest bit interested in the Yangtze or China as a whole.
Rating: 
Summary: Read backwards, as in China
Review: As a compliant reader, this book opens in Shanghai where their travels start. I found this boring and a rehash of other travel books and the usual lurid history. After reading less than half of this chapter, I flipped to the last chapter about the Yangtze headwaters in the primitive Himalaya-like mountain ranges. The story is more exciting and less covered compared to most travelogs, although both Theroux and Jenkins have written similar stories. With Winchester, however, I learned much more about the geography and history as I continued reading backwards. There is enough repetition throughout the chapters that each can stand on its own.Each chapter has a detailed submap so that the reader can follow along and not get lost. The front and back covers have a highlighted map of China so that one does loose sight of the big picture. The text and map includes a discussion of the Yellow River too, and for perspective comparisons to features in the US and UK. However, there are no tour pictures, other than his full-page mugshot on the back dustjacket, even though he brought a Leica [p32]. Winchester's book includes more than a typical travelog, he intersperses vignettes that include geography [his undergrad work is geology] and temporal history. These vignettes delve into their subject at more than cursory level in tour guides, so that the reader has a deeper understanding into the whys and wherefores. Such vignettes include Chairman Mao's swimming the river, the Three Gorges dam project, minority peoples, tea, Wuhan bridges, Precambrian Yangtze man, Chinese holocaust museum, Lu Shan, etc. Unfortunately, the vignettes are not listed as subtopics in the TOC so that it is hard to relocate them. I'd highly recommend that the author take a look at computer books for useful TOCs. There is a 9-page index and 5-page annotated suggested readings list. Quite a few pages have footnotes that help the reader recall/learn lesser-known facts, but I would have really wanted a numerical list of endnotes so that the reader could further research topics of interest. Many indented quotes and poem translations are unfootnoted. There is a pasted-in correction of the text [p260]. The author, an emancipated Brit, tries to write in an American frame of reference, but many Brit colloquialisms show through; such as lift [elevator p163], ship-breaking [-wrecking p43], railway wagons [cars p198], Perspex [Plexiglas p59], notice board [sign p140], etc. His writing style is typical of a reporter, who exaggerates describing scenes with overly powerful and emotion-charged phrases. The reader needs to filter these excesses, as in: "In places like these the water is not so much water as a horrifying white foam--a cauldron of tortured spray and air and broken rock that is filled with the wreckage of battered whirlpools and distorted rapids and with huge voids of green and black, the whole maelstrom roaring, shrieking, bellowing with a cannonade of unstoppable anger and terror [p 333]." Water is a person and has anger and is afraid? Need I say more about his allegorical attempts? Other writing issues include his freelance writer upbringings, measured by # of words, such as: "They take this runoff from the high Himalayas and the other ranges and then, capturing river after river after river along the way--all of which do just the same, scouring their source mountains for every drop of water they can find--they cascade the entire collected rainfall from tens of thousands of square and high-altitude miles down the earth-stained waters of the East China Sea [p144-5]." I kid you not but here is a 70-word sentence, part of a two-sentence paragraph. He'd flunk English 1B in any university class. Clearly this book had no editors as this is his typical writing style. And this book is full of excessively erudite phrases, such as: "Trading companies are crammed into dusty art deco palaces and crumbling godowns; there are real estate brokers and paging firms and couriers where once there were more classically Chinese functionaries, 'likin' officials, octroi collectors and compradors [p208]." Hint, there is no glossary. Curiously, from the world's outcry on the demographic moves, and cultural and environmental damage alleged due to the 3 Gorges dam, the geocentric author does not show a dotted outline that the resulting 360 mile long reservoir would cover although the author claims to have detailed DoD secret topographic maps [p xii]. Overall, however, this book is a compelling read. One just hope it is all true [p xiv]?? Since the 2008 Peking Olympics is in the works perhaps a 2nd edition is forthcoming? [page# refer to hard cover edition]
Rating:
Summary: Drying Up
Review: As a Shanghai-based expatriate seeking a better understanding of China, its tumultous history in the earlier part of the century and what it has became today, I find the the author's integration of the history, geography and the psyche of the Chinese an excellent read. A lot of what the author noted from his trip in 1995 have already manifested as very real problems of today. The aniticpated surge in overseas tourists wanting to cruise down the Yangtze River before the Three Gorges Dam is constructed has not materialised, leaving ports near the Three Gorges full of idle luxury boats. A newspaper in Beijing recently reported that overseas tourism has declined from the peak of 100,000 travellers in 1994 to fewer than 50,000 in the first eleven months of this year. At least 10 of the 28 cruise operators had closed and the remaining are heavily in debt. As of November 1999, only 2 of the cruises were stilling operating. So most of the 60 luxury vessels on the river remained docked in Chongqing, Yichang and Wuhan. Tourism interest has cooled due to poor service and the destruction of scenery by the construction work.
Rating:
Summary: One of the Best Travel Books Ever!
Review: As a teacher, Sinophile, and Japophile i get to read about these places more than i can visit them. So to hold me over between trips, I devour travel narratives of East Asia. Simon Winchester's beautiful, entertaining, and informative narrative of his journey along the Yangtze River is a classic. If you are planning a trip to China or just dreaming about it....Winchester's book is a must. Grab a lonely planet guide, Orville Schells Mandate of Heaven, and Winchester's book and you will be set. I could and read this book all day!
Rating:
Summary: Loved the book; disliked the narrator
Review: Couldn't put the book down, so entrancing was it. So it should receive a "10", right? Unfortunately the author exudes a classically British air of disdain toward not only the Chinese people, but toward tourists, herbalists and just about anyone except British ex-pats. I don't think I'd like him. I read the book as part of my preparation for a trip to China, and am so glad I did. It's both fascinating and educational. And in spite of Mr. Winchester's sneers, I'm going to be one of those ugh! tourists who cruises the Yangtze. How else can I see what he so wonderfully describes?
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating tale of the Yangzi River
Review: For the discerning Western reader with an interest in all things Chinese, Simon Winchester's "The River at the Center of the World" makes for an enthralling read. His arduous journey from the mouth of the Yangzi River to its source high in the Tibetan Plateau, is far more than merely a commentary of his travels. Entwined amongst his own colourful experiences, Mr Winchester captures a fascinating analysis of the river's history. Indeed the Yangzi has a history worthy of telling in a book of this type. Charting a course that initially wanders from the urban delights of Shanghai near the Pacific coast then along the meandering, lower reaches of the Yangzi, the reader is taken through hundreds of years of Chinese history. The author touches on elements as diverse as the Opium Wars, the turbulent history of the tea trade, the Yangzi High Dam and Emperor Da-Yu - who is attributed with rerouting the river and keeping its vast waters within China. There is space even for the origins of Asian-man to be pondered upon. Occasionally the author takes the reader on self-indulging investigative expeditions, such as seeking the anchor reportedly captured by communist forces in 1949 from the stricken warship HMS Amethyst at Zhenjiang. Upon finding it he declares it more likely to have come from a river junk. These expeditions are interesting nonetheless and aid his overall goal of depicting the Yangzi as a fascinating place both in present and past tenses. Simon Winchester has certainly done his research. He tells of otherwise obscure river-navigators, chart-makers and naturalists who made their marks in respective fields along the river's twists and turns in times long past Two thirds of the book is allocated to the more sedate stretch of water, between Shanghai and Wuhan, perhaps because this is where the far greater proportion of recent history lies. Other experiences though, like the Three Gorges, Tiger Leaping Gorge and the trip along forbidden roads in Tibet, are also allocated their due space. The end product, though is one that vividly colours the mind with written-images of a river that has formed the very heart of the world's most populated nation -continuing to very much dominate day to day life today. It is a narrative of a journey that inspires the arm-chair reader to do likewise. Indeed, I myself started reading Simon Winchester's book in far-off New Zealand, finishing it a few weeks later while visiting China - on the river itself aboard a ferry boat from Shanghai bound for Wuhan. Very inspirational stuff indeed Mr Winchester.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent reading. Good fun
Review: Having being there myself, I can testify that Mr. Winchester has done a great and precise job. Not to be miss If your are planning a trip up the great river or just want to know about it. I specially liked the historic references. I whish I had it as a guide during my trip. My regards to Lily, Mr. Winchester !!
Rating:
Summary: Good subject; terrible style
Review: I agree with Caroline Higgens. I have travelled in China and enjoyed Peter Hessler's "River Town: Two years on the Yangtze". I suspected there would be problems right from the beginning when I noticed that Mr. Winchester never expressed in a single sentence what couldn't be expanded into three paragraphs. I reached as far as page 28, where Mr. Winchester writes "...she could be the ideal companion: when matters became too trying she would brook no nonsense, give no quarter, take no prisoners".
Three cliches in a row is about three more than I want to read.
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