This book was a mammoth read. When one thinks of the WWII-era China, the mind instantly conjures up an image of Madame Chiang. There is so much detail contained within the pages. The amount of research done here is staggering. However, this book is not specifically just about Madame Chiang. It's about China from the fall of the last ruling imperial dynasty up through about 1975, when Madame Chiang's husband passed away. With that in mind, there are whole chapters where Madame Chiang's name isn't mentioned at all. These could get very boring and tedious to read. I lived for moments when Madame would make an appearance. Her early life and widowhood were fascinating for me to read about, because they were exclusively about her. I wish the book had been titled differently because really it's a dual biography of the Chiangs.

Disappointing if you are looking for a book solely about the legendary Madame Chiang Kai-shek. ( )

Actually, Tzu Hsi (Cixi), wife of the Emperor of the Ching Dynasty was the last empress of the long line of traditional dynasties of China, but Madame Chiang Kai-shek was truly the last noteworthy female paragon to represent China. "The Last Empress" is a fascinating biography of Mayling Soong, the youngest daughter of Charlie Soong.

It would be an understatement to say that the Soong family was heavily involved in politics. Mayling married Chiang Kai-shek, and her older sister Ching-ling married Sun Yat-sen, the father of Nationalist China. You might imagine one big happy family, but this was not the case. After Sun Yat-sen’s untimely death Ching-ling joined the communist party and became a loyal follower of Mao Tse-tung, who battled Chiang for years both strategically and physically in a civil war to gain power over the chinese government.

"The Last Empress" contains very detailed information about each battle and every maneuver made by Chiang in his effort to unite and liberate China. Along with the internal struggle to outwit Mao’s CCP and control the greedy warlords, Chiang also had to deal with the continuous strife caused by disagreements with foreign nations, WWI, WWII, and the Korean War.

As China suffered the atrocities of the Japanese invasion of WWII, “Mayling assumed the voice of the victim, crying out for help to the rest of the world.” She became famous world wide and in 1937 "Time" magazine named the Chiangs “Man and Wife of the Year”.

However, It becomes obvious that no matter how well intended someone is in their hopes and dreams for a better country, the unmitigated power eventually goes to their heads and corruption sets in. In many ways, similar to the Russian Revolution, the change away from dynasty and dictatorship was inevitable but not necessarily brought about in the most humane manner, and not always living up the expectations of the common public, and not carried out under the controlled environment revolutionaries imagine.

"The Last Empress" guides the reader through all stages of the revolution, from the fall of the Ching Dynasty to Mao’s rise to power and Chiang’s ultimate defeat and exile in Taiwan. This comprehensive documentary presents an inside view of the tumultuous period in China’s history that paved the way for the modern China of today. ( )

More a history of the times with emphasis on things she directly influenced. It gives a good overview. ( )

Incredibly well researched and documented, the story of Mai-ling Soong's life journey; as a young girl born into Chinese aristocracy; sent to America for education and her return to China. Her marriage to Chiang Kai-shek, helping him with the revolution to oust the Manchu government and establish republican rule, fighting the Chinese communists and attempting to unify China under one government. Then the war with Japan to regain occupied territories continuing through WWII and ultimately Chiang's move of the government to Taiwan, and the ultimate stagnation,decay and fall of the Chinese Republic.

Now it may seem to be more about China and her history (the book covers 1866-2005- a period of 139 years!)but it is truly impossible to separate her life story from that of China. She is instrumental in bringing China from third world status to one of the most powerful and important nations on the planet.

Traditionally, the role of women in Chinese culture was one of quiet subservience and obedience. Mai-ling helped bridge the gap between this ancient lifestyle to a much more cosmopolitan one in which she was as important (if not more so) than her husband Chiang Kai-shek. She became a worldwide advocate for China,speaking and personally representing the Chinese Republican government to the world.

But this is no propaganda piece. She had her faults as well, mostly her love of fine living, fine clothes and jewelry and her use of esoteric language that seemed over the head of her audience, as if trying to prove her own importance.

Madame Chiang comes across as a flesh and blood person. I found the book interesting but dense. It is not meant for easy reading. But I could not put it down. I'm glad I didn't. I highly recommend it! ( )

In her early 20s, Mei-ling Soong, youngest daughter of Chinese millionaire tycoon Charlie Soong, wrote to an American friend complaining about the restrictions placed on her as a young woman of good family in the China of 1919 or so. "I think that if I had my way, I could amount to something," said the woman who would become Mme Chiang Kai-shek.

By 1942, Mei-Ling had transformed herself into the first lady of China, a political and social powerhouse, and one of the world's most admired women, lionized as she toured the United States pleading for support for her husband's beleagured regime, cut off from the rest of the world in the city of Chungking. Much later in life, an observer would describe her multi-faceted personality -- Wellesley alumna, hard-boiled politician, lady patriot, Georgia belle and haughty empress. Biographer Hannah Pakula set out to describe and capture all those parts of Mme Chiang Kai-shek in this massive but often ponderous biography.

The result is not a fast or straightforward read, as Pakula's book -- the product of a decade of research, is long and dense, jam-packed with details of Chinese politics -- requires patience to peruse. At the end of it, while Mme Chiang still feels like an enigma to me, I do feel that at least I emerged with a much clearer understanding of the forces that shaped her and those around her -- and thus China itself.

Pakula does an excellent job of drawing a portrait of Mme Chiang, as one of the only people in Chiang Kai-shek's inner circle able to persuade the World War II nationalist Chinese leader to behave in a rational fashion, at least some of the time; as a humanitarian in a very un-Chinese tradition, founding orphanages and hospitals; as a member of a family that included some of China's most greedy and rapacious citizens. (As Pakula writes, "There is little question that May-ling, her sisters, brothers, and their spouses conducted themselves much like the Chinese dynasties that had preceded them, making important decisions for the country and making sure that those decisions were financially beneficial to their family.") Certainly, in many ways Mme Chiang did present herself like a Manchu empress. During her famous wartime trip to the United States, pleading for financial aid for China's orphans and weapons to fight off the Chinese, Pakula recounts Mme Chiang wearing traditional Chinese gowns fastened with diamonds, and traveling with an array of luxurious fur coats.

Pakula's approach to her difficult and elusive subject -- a woman who once unplugged the power cord on a reporter's tape recorder without him knowing -- is straightforward and chronological. As a result, the book is stuffed full of detail, starting with Mme Chiang's American education (which produced the Georgia belle accent she deployed to great effect whenever she needed to charm a foreign statesman) to her marriage and the battle to save her husband's regime from the dual threat of the invading Japanese and the Chinese Communists. At times, the narrative becomes exhausting to read -- I felt as if I was on some kind of "Long March" myself, with the words "The End" as my objective rather than the caves of Yenan. Too often, I think, the biography lost its focus and ended up feeling more of a history of China and Mme Chiang's role in it, than a biography. Leaving aside the other merits or flaws of the controversial biography of Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, I found that to be a much more fluid and compelling narrative, in terms of the writing, structure and choices of what to include or discard. I turned the pages of that book rapidly; this one became easy to put down for long spells.

Unbelievably, this book, vast and all-encompassing as it is, left me hungry for more, or at least, a tighter focus and greater analysis. I wanted fewer detailed analyses of the political spats within the Kuomintang and more emphasis on Mme Chiang herself; as the book unfolded, she simply became more enigmatic. Were her repeated health crises psychosomatic, invented or very real? Pakula hints at all three answers, but never really comes down on any side. What motivated the marriage and how did the relationship between husband and wife evolve? Again, Pakula ducks the core question, and instead discusses Mme Chiang's romance with Wendell Wilkie, her husband's philandering, etc. Ultimately, the portrait Pakula produces, while swarming with details and information, wasn't a revelatory one. Who was Mme Chiang and what motivated her -- greed? a desire for power? patriotism? idealism? More than 800 pages later, I'm still puzzled, but perhaps that has more to do with the subject of the book than Pakula as a biographer.

Certainly, Pakula's traditionalist and chronological approach to a biography has produced a worthy and well-researched volume that's likely to become a 'must read' biography for anyone interested in the first half of the 20th century, as China lurched from empire, to nationalist country, to a country divided by warlords and invaders, to one run by a Communist totalitarian regime. It's full of the wonderful bits of color that make all good biographies stand out, from the horrifying details of abuses practiced by all the different rulers of China (torture by the emperors, the murder of civilians by the Japanese, such as the notorious 'Rape of Nanking', and the Chiang regime's abuse of its opponents, as when Pakula tells of mass murders in the streets of Shanghai in the regime's final days, or the disembowling of a young woman in Hankow for saying publicly that Chiang wasn't the real heir to revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen) to the small details of wartime life in Chungking.

Recommended primarily to those with a strong interest in China, or in the Asian theater of World War II. ( )