To be fair to the author, I'll start with what the book is. It is well presented. The pages are all numbered and are arranged in chronological order. The text is not too big, not too small and flows from top left to bottom right, before beginning a new page that assumes the same direction. The paper is a nice weight, and has a very booky colour. The first and last pages are of a thicker paper, and have pretty pictures and larger text to let the reader know where the beginning and the end of the book are.
What the book is not. It is not what I paid for, because it is not finished. Interspersed throughout the words and pictures are little numbers, lots of them at that, as if the author has sneezed numerically on the manuscript. Every page has them, and up to this point there have been so many that I'm worried the author will run out of numbers before the end. They correspond to the space at the back of the book where one might normally allude to supporting evidence or reference. Allude he certainly does, often in the most vague of terms. Such as "See the website", "More information on the website" or fleeting mentions of hopes that DNA results will one day confirm what he's asserting, tucked into the main text.
It is not in chronological order. It's already ended twice in the first two hundred pages, and I estimate that this will happen at least once more by the end. Or perhaps not. Maybe the Chinese also discovered time travel before the people at Back to The Future, and the Chinese fleets will return to the beginning of the voyage on the penultimate page.
It is not likely to be on the National Curriculum any time soon. At one point the author asks 'Where did Admiral So And So (not actual name) get this information to know that Country A was where he drew it on the map?', inferring that the Chinese went there first. A quick Google search tells me that the answer to this question is actually answered - I got this all from loads of other maps I've seen, none of which were Chinese- in a note written next to Country A on the map. That didn't make it into the book though, just like the line "Wow, wouldn't it be great if any of this warp-drive stuff were real?" never made it into the Star Trek script.
As I said, however, I'm going to carry on with it, least of all because Anna -who devours books- reckons it'll be the first book I've read cover to cover (the thicker pages where the book begins and ends). Apparently Harry Potter doesn't count. Also, this "non-fiction" is working out as a pretty decent story, true or not, and either way it gives me a 'novel' response when I hear "China has a very long history" from somebody here for the nth time.
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