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| The novel's narrator -- a former Red Guard named Chai, who long ago fled his corrupt homeland and now lives happily on Long Island with his wife and child -- is in the throes of an obsession with this country's thirtieth President. More dangerous, he is also tempted to revisit a secret romance of his youth. The book contains a trove of satisfying Coolidgeana and the occasional "little nugget of weapons-grade Confucianism," but Derbyshire's great accomplishment is his perceptive and self-deprecating hero. When Chai mentions that during one frozen winter in norteastern China he learned English by memorizing David Copperfield, the reader is pleasantly unsurprised. | ||||