THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY AND THE MIDDLE KINGDOM
America and China, 1776 to the Present
John Pomfret
Henry Holt & Company
693 pages; $40
Donald Trump (or his next secretary of state) would be well advised to read this timely and comprehensively informative book, since no foreign topic will engage the 45th President more acutely than the currently fast-fraying relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. The coming trouble — if trouble it is to be — will be confusing, alarming, protracted and full of subtleties. This weighty history by a former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, while not