Jacob Shymanski

The Xi Jinping message would be that he has been forged by discipline, acceptance, doggedness, hard work, astuteness, constant calculation, survival skills honed in very crude circumstances, has equipped him to defy any foreign challenge and to emerge victorious.

This book sounds fantastic to me.

And one thing it sounds like it does is that it goes beyond the what and answers the why.

But also, it connects the individual Xi Jinping to bigger ideas of, you know, the place of China in the global order, right?

You know, American, British, European, Chinese, we're all just humans after all.

It's kind of funny to see that these scandals often have a similar flavor.

Another really crucial element to good quality fiction

non-fiction and you mentioned it earlier and that's that it kind of has to feel like fiction not in the sense that it feels like a story but in the sense that it should have narrative flow an amateur writer might be tempted to write as clearly and simply as possible but

And that means writing for logic.

You know, this happened, which explains why that happened.

Meanwhile, this happened because that happened.

Therefore, this happened because that happened.

Then this happened, which led to that happening.

You know, that sort of thing.

It's very...

there's a causation to everything and that gets really monotonous real fast um but great non-fiction feels like fiction because the authors think in terms of scenes and tension and release and build up and payoff and setup and there's almost a plot to it it just happens to be real

The amazing part of that is that it's all so well sourced.

It's all the work of a very responsible historian with primary sources.

He's journalistic about it.

It sounds like it's just written biographically.