Title: Winchester falls short on this one
Product review: As a great fan of travel writing and of Simon Winchester I've got to give a thumbs down for this book. Not very engaging writing. The concept is great - up a river, back in time, but Winchester doesn't really stick to this method - he does go up a river (although sometimes by boat, sometimes by car, sometimes by short flight), but he doesn't go back in time in a very methodical way. He's all over the place in time and brushes on huge events, like Mao coming to power, in the breadth of a single sentence. He doesn't dig deep into anything, he wains poetic then changes his tone to factually dry. Almost 200 pages into the book and I'm still not getting any sense of perspective, color, taste, smell - just a pot of rambling facts and mish-mash.Sorry Simon - not your best work.
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