Soong Mei-ling, better known to history as Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, is the center of this sweeping biography that covers China's 20th century change. She was the most powerful woman in the world during World War II, and she was not shy about throwing her weight around. Her father, Charlie, came to the United States as a young boy, made something of himself. He went to college at Vanderbilt, then returned to China at age 20 and raised his six children with an eye to what western culture had to offer to the entrepreneurial minded person. Charlie's three daughter's formed an interesting power structure of their own, each marrying men who had different and important destinies.
Mei-ling was an American educated woman who understood both the cultures of the east and the west. Her marriage to Chiang Kai-Shek does not appear to have been a marriage of love, nor of even affection. But she parlayed her role as the wife of the leader of Chinese forces opposed to Communism into something that no woman of her time was able to do. She wasn't liked, she might not have been widely respected, but she was influential and she knew how to make that work for her. I found the book to be very well written, with a fair amount of history about that time in China, which I know very little about. Well done, and easy to get through.
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