"Among the Braves" revisits Hong Kong's protests of 2019, offering a passionate, partisan retelling of those six-plus months of calls for change by millions of Hong Kongers frustrated at the erosion of their freedoms and lack of movement towards accountable government. Through its pages, journalists Shibani Mahtani of The Washington Post and Timothy McLaughlin of The Atlantic chart the death knell of the former British colony's existence as an open, liberal society, as had been guaranteed by the "One Country, Two Systems" formula under which the territory was returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.

The book is built around the stories of four people - three young and one old. The old one is Chu Yiu-ming, already 75 in 2019. A Baptist minister, his previous contributions as an activist included helping leaders from China's democracy movement of 1989 escape to the West, and being an organizer of 2014's Umbrella movement, a precursor of the 2019 protests when thousands of people occupied streets at three sites across Hong Kong for more than ten weeks.

Though his story is worth hearing, it also contributes to an unnecessarily long 100-plus-pages of introductory throat-clearing before the book finally reaches its main narrative - the extraordinary and totally unexpected popular uprising of 2019.

Gwyneth Ho switches from covering events as an intern for a news website to participating in them as an activist. In January 2021, she was one of 47 pro-democracy figures arrested for conspiracy to commit subversion under the national security law imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing six months previously.  The trial of all 47, which started in February this year, continues.

Art student Tommy becomes a frontliner, making Molotov cocktails and firing missiles at the police with a catapult. Out on bail after being arrested twice, he decides to flee Hong Kong for Taiwan by speedboat. Now living in exile in the United States, Mahtani and McLaughlin never reveal his surname.

Finn Lau, a surveyor based in London, rallies support for the protests with online posts. Among his achievements was popularizing the phrase "laam caau," roughly translatable as "If we burn, you burn." In July this year, the Hong Kong national security police offered a reward of HK$1 million (US $128,000) to anyone who provided information that led to his arrest.

The book fails to provide much of an assessment of the events it describes. Perhaps that's because the protests failed. They didn't move Hong Kong towards having a properly accountable elected government that could stand up to Beijing. Indeed, the imposition of China's national security law and the subsequent changes made in Hong Kong's electoral system are explicitly aimed at quashing any such developments.

The protests took a high toll on the lives of many participants, as Mahtani and McLaughlin amply make clear. Beyond the many activists now in jail or on trial expecting to be jailed, they show how many more lives were harmed in other ways, through the destruction of relationships or estrangements within families.

Yet it's also hard to see a triumph for the Hong Kong government and its backers in Beijing. The National Security Law was applied to eradicate all political opposition to Beijing. In achieving that, China turned the city's brand toxic across the West, which resulted in the departure of many middle-class families, professionals and expats.

Today, Hong Kong's economy wallows in the doldrums with a GDP no bigger now than in 2017. Its stock market index lingers at just more than half its all-time high of early 2018. This may not be the "laam caau" that Lau envisaged in 2019, when activists tried to bring the city to a halt with strikes and an attempted blockade of its airport. Yet in forcing Beijing to impose Communist Party-style political repression on the city, they have ensured that Hong Kong can only fade. Without political change, there is no prospect of Hong Kong rekindling the dynamism that once made it famous.

That's a shame and a loss. As the lives depicted in "Among the Braves" show, Hong Kong has many people with great talents and much to contribute. Unfortunately, it also has a system which failed them, and which likely will continue to fail many more.

Among the Braves: Hope Struggle, And Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy | By Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin | Hachette Books | 336 pp. | $25.99

Simon Cartledge is a writer living in Hong Kong.