China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power Review

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(More customer reviews)I have been reading quite a few books on China, as I am fascinated with and intruiged by the country's amazing economic transformation, and the potential consequences elsewhere in the world, including here in the US. (Among the better ones are China Shakes the World by James Kygny as well as The Elephant and the Dragon by Robyn Meredith). If you listen regularly to NPR Morning Edition and All Things Considered, Rob Gifford will be a familiar voice.
In "China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power" (344 pages), Gifford, who has had a lifelong fascination with China and speaks Mandarin fluently, takes us on a journey across China on Road 312, the Chinese equivalent of our Route 66. Starting in Shanghai and working his way west, Gifford meets ordinary and not-so-ordinary Chinese and simply lets them do the talking. It makes for compelling reading. Talking to a well-known radio talk-show host in Shanghai, the host remarks that "morality--a sense of what's right and wrong--doesn't matter anymore".
At some point in his journey Gifford runs into a man holding a big sign that reads ANTICORRUPTION JOURNEY ACROSS CHINA. The man tells Gifford that "You see, in the West, people have a moral standard that is inside them. It is built into them. Chinese people do not have that moral standard within them. If there is nothing external stopping them, they just do whatever they want for themselves, regardless of right and wrong".
When Gifford runs into an Indian national, he hopes to have a discussion about how things are evolving in India versus in China, but the man is not interested in having the discussion. Gifford then dryly writes "So in the end, I have the conversation with myself over dinner and I conclude that I don't want to be a Chinese peasant OR an Indian peasant. But if I have to take a side, despite all the massive problems of rural China, I'll go for the sweet and sour pork over the chicken biryani any day of the week". Gifford spends a fair amount of time giving thought whether China can ever become a real democracy. Looking back at the 13th century, Gifford writes "There are many ways in which China was far head of Europe, in terms of technological development and prosperity. But for some reason, their system never developed any real checks on state power, and since in the West these checks did emerge, it has become a real contention between the two sides".
I could go on giving more quotes from the book, but suffice it to say that Gifford brings story upon story, and observation upon observation about China the culture, the people, the country, just superb. I was in China earlier this year and happen to be in a number of the cities that Gifford talks about in the book, in particular Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing and Xi'an, and this book brought back some great memories. This book is not just a "travelogue", but instead a wonderful mix of facts and observations. Highly recommended for anyone interested in China!

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The Annals of Lu Buwei Review

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(More customer reviews)This is an outstanding work for anyone interested in the Warring States period at any level. Beginners will find the translation straight-forward, readable, even engaging from time to time. For those a little more advanced, the Preface and Introduction will prove to be extremely helpful (as the library reviews indicate). For advanced students, the translators have included the literary Chinese based on the critical edition--in traditional characters, in an easily readable script. One can only wish that we could have scholarly works like this (i.e., accessible even by beginners) for other Warring States texts, particularly the Zhang Guo Ce, XunZi, MoZi, etc.

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Zen Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets) Review

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(More customer reviews)This collection of poems from various authors captures, for me anyway, the spirit of zen being. They have a immediacy which touches you directly transporting you by their power, to the situation or place they describe. Reading them is an act of meditation in so far as it directs the mind to a place of calm. Highly recommended

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The appreciation of Zen philosophy and art has become universal, and Zen poetry, with its simple expression of direct, intuitive insight and sudden enlightenment, appeals to lovers of poetry, spirituality, and beauty everywhere. This collection of translations of the classical Zen poets of China, Japan, and Korea includes the work of Zen practitioners and monks as well as scholars, artists, travelers, and recluses, ranging from Wang Wei, Hanshan, and Yang Wanli, to Shinkei, Basho, and Ryokan.

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Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet Review

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Sky Burial is a novel that transcends the centuries, as a young Chinese wife, Shu Wen, a physician, joins the army in search of her husband, Kejun, reportedly killed in Tibet. A doctor as well, Kejun volunteered to aid to the Chinese soldiers, fighting for dominance of Tibet. Unlike the other soldiers killed in action, there is no information as to cause of death, no acclaim for the fallen man as a hero. His bride refuses to believe Kejun has perished, traveling the same route her husband took. Shu Wen has no idea at the start of the journey that she will spend the next thirty years looking for traces of her love.
In 1958, when Shu Wen joins the army to follow Kejun, China is recovering from decades of civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists and Mao is rebuilding the motherland. The Communists have had control of the country since 1949, nurturing patriotic extremism; loved ones are often separated in service of the country. Shu Wen starts out with a contingent of soldiers and eventually they come across a stranded woman, Zhuoma, a Tibetan who will prove a trusted friend and guide for a young woman far from home and family, a bride who does not speak the language.
Zhuoma has her own fascinating familial tale, which she relates to her new friend, as the two set out in the direction Kejun traveled. The women are beset by a number of trials, separated from the soldiers during a skirmish, rescued by a nomadic Tibetan family who take them in, caring for Shu Wen as she recovers her strength. It is through this family that Shu Wen learns the patterns of Tibetan life, the spiritual nature of their days and the rituals that have accommodated their needs for generations. Far from the world she has known, it is possible to exist in this rarified state of prayerful existence, lost in the centuries-old daily routines. One of Tibet's most profound religious ceremonies, the Sky Burial "manifests the harmony between heaven and earth, nature and man". This ritual reflects the Tibetan philosophy concerning the connectedness of all things, the natural flow, the great design of the spiritual universe. While Shu Wen is absorbing these time-honored traditions, her country is changing from one decade to another, rendering the China of her memory virtually unrecognizable.
Shu Wen's odyssey is related by a journalist who learns the story firsthand in an interview; soon after, the woman disappears once again into history. In thirty years of wandering, dear friends are lost and found and a human spirit awakened, as a woman continues her quest with incredible tenacity, the love of her mate filling the pages of this book with transcendent moments and indelible images. Time falls away, days reduced to the most essential elements, families immersed in Tibetan culture and religious ceremony, spending their every waking moment in prayer. Sky Burial is a poignant testimony to the power of love, commitment and spiritual awareness. Luan Gaines/2005.


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The Dream of the Red Chamber: Hung Lou Meng Review

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(More customer reviews)I have read several versions of "The Dream of the Red Chamber", including the five-volume edition published by Penguin Classics ("The Story of the Stone"), and this version is by far the best. It's been out of print for several years and I'm delighted it's been reissued. It's concise, omits nothing of importance to the story, and it's a great read. "Red Chamber" is the story of the Chia clan, a large and very rich Mandarin family, racing headlong into financial and moral ruin, which is redeemed by the youngest son of the house, the spoiled and effeminate Pao Yu. Heading the family is the Princess Ancestress, one of the most arresting and interesting characters of any literature, able to stand up to and hold her own against anyone. Other strong figures in the family are Pao Yu's father, Chia Cheng, a stern, upright, moralistic individual, unable to see past his own nose, and his aunt Phoenix, too shrewd and clever for her own good, whose intrigues and double-dealing bring the house crashing down. The tale of ruin and redemption is an old one in Chinese literature, and "Red Chamber" relates it excellently, all the while giving us fascinating insights into Chinese life, culture and values. For anyone interested in things Chinese, or anyone who just appreciates a great book, this book is a must-read.

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I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens Review

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(More customer reviews)He was the son of a self-made California businessman who often made profits betting on "fixed" horse races. Lincoln Steffens grew up privileged in a large, happy well-fixed Republican family, which he remained emotionally close to for the rest of his life. After a three year stint in Europe during which he studied at the Sorbonne and Leipzig University, Steffens was shocked to receive a $100 bill from his impatient father instructing him to immediately go to New York and do something "practical" with his life.
But his father also supplied a letter of introduction that helped his son land a job at the New York Evening Posst, a venerable, if somewhat staid and conservative major newspaper in the 1890s. From that time on, Steffens made his own way in the world. He investigated Wall Street and went on to report on major graft going on nearby, on Mulberry Street, where the New York Police Department was headquartered.
Steffens was hired a few years later, in 1901, by the brilliant editor, Sam McClure, who was already making a huge reputation for McClure's Magazine by hiring the most eclectic and original writers any magazine has ever had on its masthead --Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ida Tarbell, William Allen White and Ray Stannard Baker, among others. Years later when a contingent of these same writers had a "falling out" with the mercurial McClure, they all hid behind a door (including Steffens) while Ida Tarbell did the negotiating.
From the beginning, the very level-headed and careful Tarbell, McClure's favorite and most trusted writer, said that Steffens was "the most brilliant addition" to the McClure's staff, even though "she often felt uncomfortable with his incredibly outspoken" and what she deemed somewhat obnoxious personality.Nevertheless, despite Tarbell's misgivings, the McClure's connection was the making of Steffens as a nationally known investigative journalist. He went on to "tutor" the new police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, in the "ways" of his new department, and count him as a life-long confidante, desspite their ongoing and profound differences. And Steffens went on to investigate the governments of a score of cities across the United States -- Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Minneapolis and others, eventually packaging all these reporting forays into one critically acclaimed book "The Shame of the Cities."
And, it is a profound understatement to say that the cast of characters that Steffens made friends with along the way was legendary -- John Reed, Ernest Hemmingway, Walter Lippmann, Sinclair Lewis and others.
But in the end, the big question about Steffens that biographer Peter Hartshorn grapples with in an intelligent, careful way is why was this hard-head, award-winning muckraker was so muddle-headed when it came to looking at Russia seventeen years into the revolution when even the most ardent left-wing writers of the time were beinning to make caustic attacks on the murderous activities of the Stalin regime? The title of Hartshorn's biography, based on Steffens' famous comment, "I have seen the future," underscores the profound mark this comment and Steffens's dogmatic, uncritical view of the Stalin regime had on his journalistic legacy. As Hartshorn points out, "by 1934......daily tyranny and terror were already hallmarks of the Stalin regime, that seventeen years into the revolution could not be easily dismissed......."
"In the end," Hartshorn writes, "Steffens went too far. His aceptance of Lenin and Communism was extreme. But his painstaking diagnosis of the central problem in his own country --the deliberate suppression of democracy --and his courage in pursuing and revealing this ugly truth helped to set America on a better course, rightfully establishing the name of Lincoln Steffens as the greatest of the muckrakers."
Nevertheless, despite Hartshorn's balanced, graceful writing job and his intensive research on turn of the century politics and journalism, Lincoln Steffens himself still seems somewhat elusive.

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At the dawn of the twentieth century, Lincoln Steffens, an internationally known and respected political insider, went rogue to work for McClure's Magazine. Credited as the proverbial father of muckraking reporting, Steffens quickly rose to the top of McClure's team of investigative journalists, earning him the attention of many powerful politicians who utilized his knack for tireless probing to battle government corruption and greedy politicians. A mentor of Walter Lippmann, friend of Theodore Roosevelt, and advisor of Woodrow Wilson, Steffens is best known for bringing to light the Mexican Revolution, the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times, and the Versailles peace talks.Now, with print journalism and investigative reporters on the decline, Lincoln Steffens' biography serves as a necessary call to arms for the newspaper industry. Hartshorn's extensive research captures each detail of Steffens' life-from his private letters to friends to his long and colorful career-and delves into the ongoing internal struggle between his personal life and his overpowering devotion to the "cause."

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To a Mountain in Tibet Review

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(More customer reviews)Though still quite active, as evidenced by this book, Colin Thubron seems to belong to an earlier generation of British travel writers, the one that included Norman Lewis, H.V. Morton, Freya Stark, and Patrick Leigh Fermor (who also is still living, age 95). They wrote with grace and erudition, and with compassion, about exotic foreign places that were not served by any travel agencies. Take, for example, Thubron's latest book, TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET.
The principal subject is a trek Thubron made to and around Mount Kailas, in western Tibet, in 2009. Accompanied by a guide and a cook, both Nepalese, he hiked from Simikat, Nepal to the Tibetan border, then took a Land Cruiser to Darchen in Tibet, from where he set out by foot on a kora, or circumnavigation, of Kailas. The trip was at altitude - from 8,000 feet to 18,600 feet - and much of it was along narrow trails perched hundreds of feet up the walls of sheer river gorges or up and over landslides of jagged scree. Thus, it met the criterion of old-fashioned travel books by being physically demanding. (And Thubron did it at age 70!)
Mount Kailas is "the most sacred of the world's mountains". It is holy to Buddhists and Hindus and a host of related and precursor faiths or ways of life. It stands by itself, in splendid isolation and over 22,000 feet high, next to Lake Manasarovar (equally holy and where Mahatma Gandhi's ashes were scattered). It has never been climbed - due in part to technical difficulties but more to its remoteness and the reverence with which it is held by those who live in the area. But a circumnavigation of it is for many Hindus, Buddhists, and Tibetans what a pilgrimage to Mecca is for Moslems or to Jerusalem for Jews.
Along the way to Mount Kailas, Thubron encountered plenty of exotic sights and experiences, more than enough for a classic travel book. For example: Tibetan monks watching a soccer game on television and rooting for Manchester United and becoming enraged at the referee; caravans of goats, each carrying on its back a saddlepack filled with salt from Tibet, which will be exchanged for grain on the return trip from Nepal; a monastery in a stone hut, where pilgrims crowd in and leave behind money, which a novice collects in a box labelled "Budweiser"; and sky burials, where master corpse-dissectors render the body into pieces, which are tossed on to a platform for the vultures (after all, "A land of frozen earth, almost treeless, can barely absorb its dead.").
But, like the best of travel books, TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET transcends its subject or "travel destination". Interlaced throughout Thubron's narrative of his trek are his reports and reflections on the region's religions and ways of life and thought. Thubron is empathetic, but he does not engage in any phony or pandering attempts to become what he is not. In connection with a discussion of "tulkus" or reincarnations that he has with an abbot of a monastery exiled from Tibet, Thubron writes: "But I belong helplessly to another culture. He is focused on spiritual continuance, while I am overborne by individual death."
For Thubron in this book, the mortality that weighs on him is accentuated by the recent death of his mother, leaving him the last survivor of his family. Again and again on the trip, he is haunted by memories of his father, his mother, and his sister (who, ironically, died in an avalanche in the Alps). Those memories do not overwhelm the book, but they do give it a poignant, personal dimension which, when added to the travel adventure, the history, and the religious ethnology make TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET a special book.

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The Man from Beijing Review

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(More customer reviews)Although this quotation of Chairman Mao's is not to be found in Henning Mankell's The Man from Beijing the book is filled with politics and bloodshed.
I've enjoyed Henning Mankell's Inspector Kurt Wallander series and have read most of the books in that series. With that in mind, I turned to Mankell's newest book The Man from Beijing with great interest. This is a stand-alone book not connected with the series. The Man from Beijing was well worth reading even if didn't quite live up to my admittedly high expectations.
High Points
Mankell has put together an entertaining plot. Nineteen people have been brutally murdered in a remote village in Sweden. The opening scenes are set out in terse matter-of-fact manner that accentuates the horrors being described. It soon becomes apparent to Birgitta Roslin, a middle-aged judge in the city of Helsingborg, that she has ancestral ties to the village. Slowly but surely Roslin becomes ensnared in the subsequent investigation of the crime. The story moves across the world from Sweden to China, to Africa and then back to Sweden. Mankell does a very good job keeping the story line moving forward. His writing style is well-suited to this type of story. He is not effusive and he does not waste words. He sets a scene well and I found it hard to put the book down.
In both his Inspector Wallander series and in The Man from Beijing Mankell does a terrific job in placing a story in the context of the world around us. He does not write within the bubble of a genre but writes as if the story really is taking place in the world outside. As I read the chapters set in China and Africa, I got the feeling that in this regard Mankell shares some literary DNA with John le Carre, particularly le Carre's later works. Their writing styles differ but their insinuation of the `real world' into the stories each resonate the same way with me.
Low Point
One of the strongest points of the Inspector Wallander series for me was the fact that Wallander and his team rely on hard work, perseverance and more hard work in the pursuit of a solution to a crime or series of crime. Luck plays a hand some times but there are no flashes of Sherlock Holmes-like genius and there are no miraculous plot contrivances that get the story resolved. That was not the case in The Man from Beijing. I am always ready to suspend disbelief to a good degree when I read a piece of fiction. However, in this case I felt there were times when my suspension of disbelief was stretched to a breaking point. For me there where just one too many `coincidences' that had to be introduced to get from part A to part B and Part C of the plot.
Conclusion
The problems with the plot devices were, in my opinion, outweighed by the interesting plot and Mankell's ability to weave current social and economic and political developments in Asia and Africa seamlessly into the story.
Recommended. L. Fleisig

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