Status Updates From Deng Xiaoping and the Trans...

Written in a way that paints the political history and government affairs covered by this book in a lively hue and helps reader track the various events and dynamics at play with a building curiosity for what happens next. I have learned a lot so far.

So far this is packed with information, but in the same way that Wikipedia is: the style is dry, events are not dramatized at all, and details are left to the reader's imagination. I imagine these preliminary chapters are mainly here to set the stage for an ensuing deep dive, but I'm not lying when I say that I'm missing some of the novelistic detail that can give a biography real life. Also, overly repetitious.