You ever try to read a book and you find you just can’t get into it? I just did. Twice. Still can’t get into it. Set it aside a couple months after reaching the half-way mark; figure I’d have another try at it again. Forced to lay on my back for several days in submission to a flu, what better opportunity could a book have to exploit an unsuspecting human being? Still, no success. I’ve closed the book up again, put it back on the shelf.

Managing the Dragon: How I am Building a One Billion Dollar Company in China is about as self-aggrandizing an autobiography as they come. But then again, as one friend told me when I told him how bored I was with the book, “Bill: the title does say ‘How I am building …” In other words, my friend was saying you CAN judge a book by its cover. Managing the Dragon is the autobiography of Jack Perkowski, CEO of Beijing-based ASIMCO, a holding company with a plethora of auto parts manufacturing facilities throughout China. Unfortunately, the autobiography is not finished yet, as Perkowski is still well and alive and lecturing on the back of the book. That means there’ll likely be a sequel, which I will also probably be unable to finish reading for the tears of boredom leaking from my eyes. (“My life is a stack of books, unfinished in the reading. – ME “).

The book starts with his childhood as a working class kid in Jersey (New, that is); who gets into Yale; Harvard Business School; works on Wall Street, makes loads of cash; convinces financiers in the early 90′s through vision and grit that China is THE NEXT BIG THING; gets nearly a billion dollars to finance a start-up in China; loses nearly a billion dollars financing a start up in China; and learns stuff along the way to become a better magnate. End of story … i have to guess, because I can’t seem to finish the book.

Tom Clissold’s side of the ASIMCO story is a far better written, much more entertaining and far more illuminating about the trials and tribulations of the early years of ASIMCO and of the “joys” of joint ventures in China. Clissold’s autobiography Mr China is self-effacing and simply a good read. Managing the Dragon reads like a cross between an over-achieving cv and an American football playbook with Harvard MBA-type buzzwords thrown in to add credibility to what would otherwise would have just been a playbook (if Perkowski’s ghost writer had used the word “bench” as a verb one more time I thought I was going to puke).

Now, just to prove to myself that I haven’t become jaded reading these books by “China Hands,” I decided to pick up the copy of 400 Million Customers I had bought from Sinomedia (publishers of The China Economic Review) just a month before Spring Festival 2009. Carl Crow wrote the book some seventy years ago. Crow made pots of money through the advertising company he owned and operated out of Shanghai for nearly twenty years. In my eyes his claim to fame was the popularization through his collectible posters of the qi pao, that lovely and elegant work of fashion that makes most any Chinese woman look like a million bucks when she dons one. Crow lived and traveled throughout China from 1911 to 1937, when a Japanese bomb dropped from the sky and exploded on the street in front of his home.

400 Million Customers is absolutely brilliant! The book, too, is written in the first person, and is packed from the first page with his experience and the experience of his customers in China with the buying and selling habits of the Chinese when China first opened up to the world, just before World War II. From the first page I was chuckling at the anecdotes, nodding in affirmation at the some of the characterizations with which I’ve had experience in China, and genuinely enlightened about the motivations behind other notions the Chinese have. I will devote a full review to 400 Million Customers when I’ve finished reading it, which should be any day, now, as its tough to put down. Ah, they don’t write them like they used to.

Wished they did, though.

But then again, I just may one day be able to finish reading Managing the Dragon. Who knows, perhaps if I have a bad case of la duzi and am once again captive …