heatheradiamond's reviews
296 reviews

Hong Kong is a complex place with a complicated history and present, and Xu Xi does a beautiful job of presenting how it feels to love and leave a place that is lodged in your heart. As someone who is a different kind of insider/outsider (temporary Hong Kong resident married into a Hong Kong family) I appreciate her honesty and insight about her love affair with a place that has always been an intersection between cultures and is now changing beyond recognition.

This is an extraordinary and wondrous book, one that has altered my perceptions and to which I will return. Through a deeply personal dive into the life and scholarship of David Starr Jordan, Miller exposes the ramifications of hierarchical categorization of the natural while charting her journey through a crisis of identity. This is a profound and impressively researched story that is accessible for non-science readers as well as being beautifully written with humor and a sense of mission. Goes on my shelf of books that made me stop and rethink my beliefs.