Word: sinclairs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hungover Sinclair greeted me on my first morning. Unable to speak coherently on account of a recent tracheotomy, he made the gesture of raising a drinking vessel to his mouth. I assumed this was an instruction to bring him coffee. In fact, he was proposing that we go to the pub, and by 11 a.m. we were at the Smuggler's Inn in the seaside town of Stanley. As word got around of Sinclair's whereabouts, uproarious characters - friends or contacts - began to stream in and a party ensued. Toward sunset, having drank steadily for the entire day and consumed...
...Sinclair eventually became the doyen of Hong Kong's press corps and a prolific author, editor and columnist. His memoir, Tell Me a Story: Forty Years of Newspapering in Hong Kong and China, is an anecdote-rich chronicle of his life and career, a newsman's perspective on major events in recent Chinese history - from the Cultural Revolution to the launch of China's economic transformation - and an encomium to his adopted home, Hong Kong. Sinclair and tales of drinking go together like Scotch and a beer chaser, and passages of Tell Me a Story also document his struggles with...
...Born to a teenage single mother in Wellington, New Zealand, Sinclair was raised in impoverished circumstances and, though bright, left school at 16. After being arrested and brought to court for throwing rocks through a train-station window, he was interviewed by a juvenile counselor. Startled by the young vandal's command of Gorky, Conrad and Steinbeck, the counselor eventually referred Sinclair to a copy-boy position at Wellington's Evening Post. From there, his progress through the newspaper world of New Zealand and Australia was buccaneering: sleeping rough on Queensland's Gold Coast after turning up drunk and late...
...chance encounter with Edgar Snow's sweeping account of the Chinese revolution, Red Star Over China, had given Sinclair a pent-up curiosity about Chinese culture since his boyhood, and from the moment of his arrival as a 25-year-old he became an assiduous student of it. He openly despised the kind of expatriates who "seldom meet a normal Hongkonger" and instead sided with and befriended Chinese at the grass-roots level. For the next 40 years, his work and life were peopled with laborers, police constables and villagers of Hong Kong's rural New Territories region, which...
...Completed just two weeks before his death, Tell Me a Story is imperfectly written but no less compelling for that - these are, after all, the words of a man ravaged by chemotherapy, who knew he was dying. But swaths of it are equal to Sinclair at his roaring, mid-period best. He never compensated for his tracheotomy by being verbose in print - on the contrary, having to choose every spoken word with great care taught him the value of writing with fierce economy. At the book's launch, four days before he died, Sinclair was too ill to even sign...