Shanghai Fury
Peter Thompson
Spanning the century between the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 and the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Shanghai Fury provides a panoramic view of the Chinese Revolution from its turbulent origins in the Taiping Rebellion against the Manchu Dynasty to its violent aftermath in the monumental battles between Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) and the Japanese armed forces.
Peter Thompson, author of Pacific Fury and its prequel Anzac Fury, presents China’s vast and complex modern history in a dramatic and easy-to-read fashion, with the great city of Shanghai as the focal point of the narrative.
As in the other two books in the ‘Fury Trilogy’, the author combines personal memories with combat action to produce a gripping narrative of extraordinary power and depth.
Book Details:
- Author: Peter Thompson
- On Submission
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- Oceania and Asia: Random House Australia
Peter Thompson
Peter Thompson, born in Melbourne, joined the London Daily Mirror in 1966. He was a Fleet Street journalist for twenty years, rising to night editor and deputy editor of the Daily Mirror, editor of the Sunday Mirror and a director of Mirror Group Newspapers. In 1988 Thompson was the first Mirror Group editor to break ranks and expose the criminality of his boss Robert Maxwell. Thompson’s first book, Maxwell: A Portrait of Power, written with former Mirrorman and fellow Australian Anthony Delano, detailed the publishing tycoon’s rise to power through acts of fraud, deception and ...
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Book Reviews
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"
...this highly readable history set chiefly in the rambunctious, international city of Shanghai between the first Opium War of 1840 and the declaration of the People's Republic in 1949. He cleverly, and with few signs of the intricate stitching required, weaves his Australian dramatis personae into the wild story of China's travails as it struggled to shed its senile, malfunctioning Manchu dynasty, started to modernise as a democratic republic before being invaded by atypically obnoxious Japanese, and then fell, mostly with unknowing enthusiasm, into the hands of the murderous, cynical ideologue Mao Zedong.... History, Thompson concludes, "has a way of separating the dross from the hidden gems". He has unearthed a couple of dozen in this book, a rare haul."
Weekend Australian