It's been a trying week chock-full of technical mishaps and PC operating system roadblocks that's prevented me from issuing daily dispatches, so kindly excuse the short delay. I've finally kicked the can and upgraded to Windows 7, and a very good riddance to the most annoying Vista! Since the summer of '08, I've experienced nothing but trouble with the latter -- from the very first week I'd been using it -- so I'm absolutely over the moon to see it go. How about you? Any Vista troubles you might care to share?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I was glad to crack open the mailbox recently to discover my Amazon copy of prominent University of Toronto professor Margaret Macmillan's popular Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World, a detailed account of the preparations leading up to the historical February 1972 summit between disgraced former US President Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung during the former's visit to the PRC after more than two decades of complete Sino-US diplomatic silence during the height of the Cold War.

In that familiar vein which only the New York Times bestselling author can, Macmillan doesn't fail to deliver this time either, just as she had in her groundbreaking Paris 1919, a definitive account of the heady times and swirling events surrounding the fabled Versailles Peace Conference which closed out the then-Great War, the "war to end all wars." Just a few pages into Nixon and Mao, and I can already spot those familiar Macmillan prosaic flourishes, sticking to the main throughline as she supplies a bevy of behind-the-scenes action about those seemingly small anecdotal bits which never quite seem to make it into the headlines. If you're curious about the sorts of outfits the various players were wearing during those fateful days, or in the surrounding chatter by the foreign diplomatic corps then-resident in China at the time, the sorts of details which weren't accessible during contemporary accounts of the day, this book is for you. As Macmillan laces a few of these together, readers will gain a more complete picture of the momentousness of the occasion. Historical narrative, at its best.

One of the first things I did when I slit open the packaging was to flip directly to the book's central photo section for a glimpse of several -- yet again -- rare behind-the-scenes images that weren't published in the newspapers at the time which show the US entourage being lead all around Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou, oblivious to the roiling ferment which had just recently died down during the worst three years of Mao's Cultural Revolution. The People's Republic of the 1970s was a nation living in abject fear of authority, evidenced by the diary entries of some key members of the US' travelling delegation describing the seeming other-worldliness of the Chinese people milling about the capital's streets during the early 1970s. Beijing of 1972 was a city full of low-rises, hutongs, and bicycles. Residents of the city were both forbidden from making eye contact with the motorcades speeding about the city, and from discussing things they might have witnessed as the Americans gradually reacquainted themselves with its former Chinese wartime ally which they had abandoned to her own Communist devices only two short decades previously.

Nixon and Mao is not a straight historical narrative play-by-play. Macmillan, as is her custom, furnishes the needed embellishing details about Nixon's concerted preparations in advance of his momentous journey, in addition to his on-plane habits and about the swirl of preparations as his aides funneled him as much data as the former President could handle while Nixon sunk himself into the material. The junket flew the trans-Pacific route in three stages (Mainland US-Hawaii-Guam) to ensure that the President would be as well-rested as possible for this history-making odyssey, the significance of which all present at the time were clearly aware. The 1972 trip was hyped in the media as being on a par with Marco Polo's 13th-century sojourn during imperial times.

If you're on the hunt for that unusual something to supplement your standard Chinese business reading, this could be it. So far it's been a page-turner.

I'll be back with more reflections as I make greater headway.