Chinese Eunuchs: The Structure of Intimate Politics by Taisuke MitamuraMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
As others have mentioned, this book is rather poorly written. I understand it is a book about Chinese Eunuchs, written in Japanese and then translated into English, but that has little to do with it. First of all, many things are asserted (including that genitals can grow back on eunuchs once they've been cut off) without sources or footnotes of any kind. The spelling of Chinese names and words is a hodgepodge (Guangdong, or 廣東, is spelled as Kuang tung, Kwangtung, Canton or Kwangung, although I'm pretty sure the last one was a typo. Also, T'ien An Gate rather than Tiananmen seems odd, although I guess it was written before Tiananmen became well-known). I feel like the translator should have been able to standardize these, preferably to Pinyin (most spellings are Wade-Giles, or variations thereof. none are pinyin).
And, once again as other commenters have mentioned, it jumps around, often hitting on subjects that have nothing to do with eunuchs, without ever really tying these subjects together.
Also, he claims that Japan never had eunuchs because they didn't conquer any other countries (uhm...). However, Korea had eunuchs, so there goes that argument.
2 stars, because there were some interesting tidbits interspersed throughout.
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