Product Description
In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman ("Elegant and scrupulous"—New York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa ("A mesmerizing page-turner"—Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically advanced country. No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student, with whom he began a lifelong affair. He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded the ever-enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest frontiers of this ancient empire. He searched everywhere for evidence to bolster his conviction that the Chinese were responsible for hundreds of mankind's most familiar innovations—including printing, the compass, explosives, suspension bridges, even toilet paper—often centuries before the rest of the world. His thrilling and dangerous journeys, vividly recreated by Winchester, took him across war-torn China to far-flung outposts, consolidating his deep admiration for the Chinese people. After the war, Needham was determined to tell the world what he had discovered, and began writing his majestic Science and Civilisation in China, describing the country's long and astonishing history of invention and technology. By the time he died, he had produced, essentially single-handedly, seventeen immense volumes, marking him as the greatest one-man encyclopedist ever. Both epic and intimate, The Man Who Loved China tells the sweeping story of China through Needham's remarkable life. Here is an unforgettable tale of what makes men, nations, and, indeed, mankind itself great—related by one of the world's inimitable storytellers.
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 wow
wo hen xihuan zhege gushi (I really liked this story)! Again a fascinating account of a fascinating man forgotten by history.
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 Cashing on Beijing Olympics ( skolin )
Should have been called the Biography of Joseph Needham. And if it were, it would still be a poorly written one, though it would benefit from a more accurate title.
You don't learn about China enough in this book to appreciate the man or his work. I wanted to gleam about the wonder that is china. Failed there.
This book evidently was released with the primary reason of cashing in on the news item that China is in the wake of the Olympics. It hardly has anything substantiative in it.
For somebody who had read Winchester work on Krakatoa, which was obviously Superb, this one make one want to blow the top off in disappointment.
He fails my expectation.
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This is a fascinating story! ( editorial43 )
Joseph Needham was a bright, elegant, sophisticated scientist with an impeccable pedigree. His work in Cambridge was in biochemistry, a profoundly intense field, and he was a huge and influential success. He was a freethinking intellectual, however, who had predilections for both the decidedly base love of nudism and unique brands of folk dance. With this wide range of interests, he attracted a great deal of attention from colleagues and friends --- and, although married at the time, lovers as well. In 1937 he met Lu Gwei-djen, a Chinese scientist, and they embarked on a long-term, long-distance relationship that first brought him into contact with his beloved China.
Simon Winchester, esteemed author of THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMEN, brings Needam's story and the love that created his most lasting accomplishments to light with profound research and remarkable emotional acuity in THE MAN WHO LOVED CHINA.
Winchester is not exactly a flowery writer, but he somehow manages to tell historical tales about deep-thinking men and women through their emotional entanglements. It is this delving into the souls of these high-flying intellectuals that THE MAN WHO LOVED CHINA finds its center. Needham is a fascinating character, and Winchester wastes no words in relaying his most fervent desires to understand the "middle kingdom" at a time when China and its eons-old culture was an exotic and strange mystery yet to be solved. From the first chapters, where the foundation is laid for the love that Needham and Gwei-djen shared, to the thrilling episodes of Needham's rough-and-ready travels as a stranger in a strange land, Winchester manages to extrapolate the warmth and heartfelt desire Needham had to mine both in the hearts and minds of the fantastic culture that he brought to light.
In the early part of the 20th century, the many inventions and creative traditions of the Chinese culture and its history were not yet given credit by the masters of industry from First World nations. It was into this morass of misinformation that Needham strode, holding fast to his convictions that Chinese technology and inventions --- which included the compass, suspension bridges and even toilet paper --- were making a quiet but significant mark on the world-at-large. His great tome, SCIENCE AND CIVILISATION IN CHINA, tried to put a face to the timeline of Chinese innovation, and by the time he died, he had created 17 volumes of remarkable information that not only proved his convictions but ensured his spot in the world history books.
Needham's passion is matched by Winchester's sharp and easy-to-read richness of language and scene. They are a perfect pair, and THE MAN WHO LOVED CHINA is a thrilling story of yet another eccentric who looked into the void and pulled forth a work built on lust, desire, love, passion and sheer academic brilliance. This is a fascinating story!
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
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 Winchester's book-length author's bio of Needham and his opus shortchange both
Biography of Joseph Needham reads something like an extended review of his epic opus "Science and Civilization in China" (24 volumes to date, starting in 1954, and still in progress). Everything in the biography points to this life work, but then at the point when a more extended description and review of this manifold work is in order, Winchester steams to his finish with a chapter describing a political pothole Needham created for himself in the deepest part of the coldest-War McCarthy era, and then a chapter about the end of his career and his final decline and death.
So while Needham's story is fascinating, I left it feeling shortchanged and wanting to know more about both Needham and his book. He was a lifelong small-"s" socialist and even small- "c" communist (and constant supporter of Mao and his Communist revolution), but never a Communist. Yet he appeared to be an unwitting dupe of an anti-American plot that subsequently unclassified Chinese, Korean, and Russian documents have revealed were pure Cold War propaganda set pieces. At least Winchester concludes Needham's unwitting dupehood (dupeness? dupicity?), but I was left wanting to know more about the incident from British archives or other sources (in Winchester's defense, he found during his research that American archives on the incident were still classified at the time of writing).
I would have also have liked to know more about the fact-gathering trips around China made by Needham during his first five-year sojourn there (for example, maps showing key cities and points of discovery on his various routes would be nice), and about subsequent trips made to China on similar fact-finding missions.
Finally, I was left wanting to know more about Science and Civilization itself. Winchester clearly states Needham's purpose in planning and writing of the book: first to document China's many historic firsts in discovery and invention to counteract Western intellectual laziness and presumptive (and spectacularly wrongheaded) NIH snobbishness, and second to answer the question of why, approximately 500 years ago) Chinese inventiveness ground to a halt.
But I want to know more about the product itself. For example, a family tree of the books' titles, volumes, and sub-volumes, and tables of contents would be interesting, and perhaps brief sketches of highlights of each volume. An appendix listing the titles, publication dates, authors and coauthors (nearing the end of his long working life, Needham realized he would be unable to complete the vast work he had envisioned, and subcontracted out writing of sections and entire volumes to other authors) would also be nice.
And finally, while the comparison to the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of National Biography is briefly mentioned, as all three are vast multi-volume encyclopedic works that grew out of one man's vision, it would be interesting to know more about these parallels. Particularly interesting, and curiously missing in light of Winchester's earlier bestseller The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary are more parallels to that great work. Surely, in researching and writing these two books Winchester found many more interesting parallels and ideas of concordance and apposition than the brief mention he gives here.
In short, while this was not a bad book, I was left a bit frustrated by these inadequacies, especially from such a well-read and criticly-acclaimed writer.
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I Loved "The Man Who Loved China"
I have recommended this CD set to everyone I think would be interested. This is the story of a brilliant man, a scientist, with an avid curiosity about all aspects of life, but his passion becomes China, her language and her past. Joseph Needham was a Cambridge scholar, a lover of women, an adventurer and wrote the definitive volumes on the scientific contributions China made to civilization. If this sounds dry, believe me, it isn't. Narrated by the author, Simon Winchester, it is written with humor,elegance, and a genuine admiration and enthuiasm for this unique man. Winchester's narration is as crisp and brilliant as his writing. I actually think it is better to hear this book than to read it as his pronunciation of Chinese names and cities is flawless and unless one is familiar with China these strange names could prove stumbling blocks in the reading.
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