[brianwillis]

I'm reading through the sample on my Kindle now. His similes are a little forced ("battles like this one raged across Beijing like a multitude of CPUs working in parallel, their combined output, the Cultural Revolution"), but he does know how to tell a story. By the end of the second chapter I was sold.

[hackuser]

Metaphor might not translate easily, either linguistically or culturally.

[yzzxy]

That's almost definitely mangling of Chinese idiom puns - suffice to say they are much more succinct in Mandarin.