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Rating: 
Summary: Spectacular Orientalist Cheese...
Review: Every orientalist cliche you could imagine, knee-deep like the pile of some hallucinatory Oriental rug. I'm sure there are those who'd find it insulting... but to me it was just kitschy fun. Frankly, I would NOT want a kid to read this-- they don't know enough to sift through the stereotypes. But it deserves to be picked up for any undergraduate cultural studies syllabus dealing with Western ideas about the Orient. (It also helps that it's a fun read, in its own pulpy way. Great airplane book.)
Rating: 
Summary: INSIDIOUS!
Review: I must say that I blush in confessing that reading this book gave me the chills. One way to gauge a story is by the force of antagonism raised against the hero. In this book, the force of antagonism is perfectly ominous, artfully deadly, and rancidly horrific--the Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu rouses high expectations, and chapter after chapter it exceeds them. Everything that you would want from a mystery/suspense/action/adventure novel is here in this book, and it is here in high doses. Brimming with intrigue, romance, mystery, murder, mayhem, zaps, traps, pitfalls, poisons, hair-breadth escapes and miraculous revivals, the 'Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu' grabs you from the start and doesn't let you go 'til the end, and by that time you're so intoxicated from the deep pleasure this book has provided that you either A: Read this book again, and/or B: Yearn to get your hands on copies of the next books in the series (which, unfortunately, are hard to come by these days). Have I mentioned that this book gave me the chills? Chills, thrills, and the greatest of heart-pounding, nail-biting, deviously sublime episodes of reading you'll ever have. Great fun!
Rating: 
Summary: Solid intro for the leader of the Yellow Peril...
Review: Sax Rohmer's work has been compared to Arthur Conan Doyle's often enough that I felt compelled to check it out, and discover more about Fu-Manchu beyond what I already knew about the character (that a certain kind of 1970's moustache was named after him). At one time the West was terrified of "Young China", and the forces at work in China that could conceivably have led to a radical alteration of the world's power structures. The Chinese were the bad guys because they were "inscrutable" (love that word!), and therefore frightening. Without a doubt, the view of the author is rather dated, in his obvious bias against the Chinese (or at least they were handy villains for him). His constant allusions to the "Yellow Peril" and the unspeakable dangers posed to the white race by the yellow is in keeping with the times (1913), but a bit overboard nevertheless. The book is more of a series of sketchy, running battles between the sinister Fu-Manchu and hero Smith rather than a standard, cohesive narrative. This should come as no surprise since the author cobbled together several of his Fu-Manchu short stories into this one single volume. However, the results of this process are mixed, and not totally effective. Not that it really matters, since this novel was successful enough to call for more and better stories with the homicidal genius. This particular edition (Dover Classic Mysteries), is very inexpensive, and well worth the price of admission to experience the debut of Fu-Manchu, and to learn something about the social attitudes of the time in which he was created.
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