John E. Wills, Jr. (1936—2017) was a longtime leader of China studies at University of Southern California and the author of many acclaimed works in cultural history, including Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History and 1688: A Global History.
Wills (history, Univ. of Southern California; Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History) has fashioned a wide-ranging, serendipitous collection of histories and accounts centered around 1688. The year occurred during a period of unprecedented exploration and exchange of ideas, and the book is at its best revealing these "global intersections." The author details Englishman William Dampier's observations of the Australian Aborigines, German herbalist Georg Everard Rumpf's studies of Indonesian plant life, Scots general Patrick Ivanovich Gordon's exploits in Imperial Russia, and Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest's experiences in Beijing (the Society of Jesus' willingness to accept Confucianism as a secular tradition is particularly intriguing). However, passages lacking this cross-cultural perspective tend to flag, reading like anecdotal prefaces to weightier studies for which the reader will have to resort to the bibliography. The brief passages on the personal and literary struggles of Aphra Behn in England and Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz in Mexico, for example, would have been improved had the two women been examined together. Nevertheless, Wills makes the most of the freedom afforded by the arbitrariness of his selections and covers a great deal of intellectual as well as geographical territory. Recommended for academic libraries.DRichard Koss, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Although he realizes that "the very concept of the world in a single year is an artificial one," USC historian Wills (Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History; etc.) has merged cultural anthropology and history to reflect through the prism of a single year the shape of the world poised on the edge of modernity. This ambitious effort has a number of strengthsÄsuch as the quality of its writing and its ability to weave together disparate narrative threads. But for many readers, this account's greatest strength will be what it is notÄEurocentric, limited by gender and ethnicity, confined by class. It touches on events in Africa, the New World, China, Japan, Australia and eastern and western Europe. We go from the world of the Kangxi emperor in China to that of an African Muslim slave in the New World. In constructing this multifarious history, Wills draws on sources as diverse as the correspondence of far-flung Jesuit missionaries, the records of the Dutch and English trading companies, contemporary poetry, diaries and even a ketubah (a Jewish marriage contract). Wills thus succeeds in producing a vivid picture of life in 1688Äa picture filled with terrifying violence, frightening diseases and religious and political persecution, but also with comfortingly familiar human kindnesses, familial affections and the scientific and intellectual achievements of Leibniz, Locke and Newton, among others. Wills provides a satisfying, many-faceted tour of the world in 1688 that will appeal to readers with a far-ranging curiosity about the world and its history. Illus. not seen by PW. (Jan.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
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