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Last Night I Dreamt Of China
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : Ernest White
Dec 4, 2008
Tags :
Last Night I Dreamt Of China
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| Author: W. Somerset Maugham ★★★★
Following in the footsteps
of literary giants isn't always
easy. In the case of William
S o m e r s e t Maugham and
his 1919–1920 voyage to China,
it is almost impossible, as the
Englishman's On a Chinese Screen
contains none of the specifics usually
seen in travelogues. Instead it is made
up of 58 sketches: self-contained vignettes
which deftly outline whole
lives, locations and digressions on art
and travel in just a few sentences.
In some respects, On a Chinese
Screen seems remarkably progressive
for its time. When the bamboo-clad
hills, serene pagodas and richly-garbed
Chinese figures evoked by the book's
title appear, it is with self-conscious
reference to the Western imagination's
preoccupation with such images of the
"mysterious" East. When Maugham
uses the word "inscrutable" it is generally
to undermine rather than perpetuate
Orientalist stereotypes. And ... ... |
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Global Shanghai
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : JFK Miller
Dec 1, 2008
Tags :
Global Shanghai
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| Author: Jeffrey Wasserstrom ★★★★★
rofessor Jeff Was ser s t rom has written the most
enthralling history of modern Shanghai
there is. Global Shanghai, 1850-
2010: A History in Fragments does not
claim to be a definitive history (it focuses
on seven pivotal years set a quarter
of a century apart – 1850, 1875, 1900,
1925, 1950, 1975, 2000 – hence the
"fragments" of the title), nor does it claim to
provide definitive answers to the intriguing
questions it raises. Instead,
the University of California history
professor seeks to frame those questions
in a meaningful historical context.
The result is a meticulously researched,
cornucopic splendiferous
wonder. Yes, we did say history book.
Wasserstrom debunks more than a
few myths as he traverses 160 years
of modern Shanghai history. The
greatest of these is what he calls
"The Shanghai Illusion" – namely that
the city has been represented and
... ... |
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What Next?
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : JFK Miller
Dec 1, 2008
Tags :
What Next
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| Author: Chris Patten ★★★
Former Hong Kong supremo Chris Patten describes
himself in the opening pages of What Next? Surviving the
Twenty-First Century as "not a particularly angry old man."
Perhaps, but he makes an excellent case for sounding just
like your dad – censorious, sometimes erudite, sometimes
rambling, often insightful, often tangential, occasionally
humorous, and regularly
wearisome. In this 500-page prospectus for world
change, the ex-Thatcher government minister and
European commissioner traverses all the big global
issues of our time - climate change, weapons proliferation,
epidemic disease, drug trafficking, energy
poverty and abuse, water shortages, international
crime, China, India, Russia, you name it. This isn't
so much a book of answers but a book of one big,
fat question: How the hell did we get into such a
mess? Patten blames the current economic meltdown
on the US and China (Chinese bankrolling of ... ... |
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The China Lover
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : Ernest White
Nov 5, 2008
Tags :
The China Lover
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Author: Ian Buruma ★★★
Don't be fooled by The China Lover's
title – it's not really about the Middle
Kingdom at all. Instead, this novel's
main concern is Japan, and its changing
attitudes towards China, the
West, and itself. This shifting focus,
together with academic and author
Ian Buruma's polymath intelligence,
means that very little about The China
Lover is straightforward. Its central
character is an enigma: Yoshiko
Yamaguchi, the Sino-Japanese actress
who, as "Ri Koran", was used as a
propaganda tool by the Japanese during
their occupation of China, before
she metamorphosed into Hollywood's "Shirley Yamaguchi" and
later a member of Japan's parliament. To complicate matters
further, her story is told by not one, but three male narrators,
who have little in common other than their outsider status. The
China Lover covers an awful lot of intellectual ground, exploring
not just gender, national ident ... ... |
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Missy's China
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : Ernest White
Nov 5, 2008
Tags :
Missy’s China
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Author: Doris ("Missy") Arnold ★★★
If today's China sometimes feels like
another planet to new arrivals, what
must it have been like for expats living
here 60 or 70 years ago? That's where
two new books edited by Shanghaibased
writer Tess Johnston come in.
The slimmer of the pair, Peking Sun,
Shanghai Moon is a memoir by socialite
Diana Hutchins Angulo, who
grew up in Beijing and then become a
young woman in Shanghai. Sweeping
generalisations about Chinese culture
aside, the book's accounts (and nostalgic
photographs) of the privileged
lifestyles of Shanghai's rich and famous
as they party like it's 1939 are a
window onto a world which is gone forever. Missy's China, meanwhile,
is a collection of the letters sent home by a wife and mother
from small town America who spent several years in Hangzhou
during the thirties. Many of Missy's experiences and observations
wouldn't sound out of place in an expat e-mail today, bu ... ... |
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Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : Ernest White
Nov 1, 2008
Tags :
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
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Author: Paul Theroux ★★★★
Continuing to find new destinations and
fresh ways of describing them can be
a real problem for travel writers. However,
this is a challenge Paul Theroux tackles head
on in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. As he
retraces the journey he made three decades
earlier for his classic The Great Railway
Bazaar, the veteran author is desperate to
avoid "the tedious reminisces of better days,
the twittering of the nostalgia bore". Thanks
to his skill as a writer, he manages to avoid
these potential pitfalls in style.
Although it follows in The Great Railway
Bazaar's tracks, Ghost Train's route is not exactly the same. Iran
and Afghanistan, for instance, have been replaced with new (and
less dangerous) possibilities such as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.
However, whether Theroux is returning to a destination or visiting it
for the first time, the world has changed, and the influences of globalization
and geopolitics cont ... ... |
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Bright Shiny Morning
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : Ernest White
Oct 29, 2008
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Bright Shiny Morning
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AUTHOR : James Frey AVAILABLE : Now
However much some people like it, plenty of others will moan
about "Bright Shiny Morning". Some of the book's detractors
will slag it off simply because it's written by James Frey, the
man who shocked the literary world – and Oprah – when it
was revealed that his harrowing memoir, "A Million Little Pieces",
wasn't entirely truthful. Others who don't object to the author
himself will instead object to the way he writes, with this, his epic
of Los Angeles, featuring prose so painfully hip it will have
some people reaching for pharmaceutical relief. Undeniably,
plenty of those who moan about "Bright Shiny Morning" will
have good reason to do so. And yet, almost inexplicably, there's
still something rather wonderful about it.
Whatever this wonderfulness might be, it's certainly not Frey's
style. His writing is unique only if you belong to a library that
stopped co ... ... |
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The Other Hand
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : Ernest White
Oct 29, 2008
Tags :
The Other Hand
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AUTHOR : Chris Cleave AVAILABLE : Now
Chris Cleave's "The Other Hand" is a strange, arresting
book, which is both charming and deeply troubling. Its magic
stems from the way Cleave conjures up two distinctive female
voices, and then switches between them as their unlikely
connection is explained. This connection is also the root of
the book's disturbing side – first and foremost because of the
horrifying scene on an isolated Nigerian beach that initially
brings the two central characters together, and later because
of the terrible ramifications of this unexpected encounter.
It is difficult to talk about what happens in "The Other
Hand" without spoiling the
story, but Cleave exhibits a masterful control over his
narrative. He also creates two engaging
and utterly convincing characters in the shape of Little
Bee, the teenager who flees her Nigerian village to become
trapped in immigration limbo in the UK, ... ... |
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An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by : Ernest White
Oct 29, 2008
Tags :
An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy
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AUTHOR : Karyn L. Lai AVAILABLE : Now
Chinese philosophy continues to exert a profound
influence on modern China, in ways that are often little understood
by visitors from abroad. Fortunately, help is at hand, for
while Karyn L. Lai's introductory guide to Chinese philosophy is
intended as an undergraduate textbook, it will also be useful for
waiguoren who want to start exploring the country's culture and
history in more depth. It seems easier, of course, to tackle something
like Daoism when it is repackaged as bite-sized chunks
of self-help wisdom or explained with reference to Winnie the
Pooh, but the advantage of a book like Lai's is its rigour and
scope. Although her explanations are sometimes a little dry
and repetitive, in "An Introduction to Chinese
Philosophy" the author manages very successfully
to outline the most important traditions, from
Confucianism and Daoism to Legalism and Mohism, while locating
them within ... ... |
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REVIEWS: NEW BOOKS(08-05)
Art+Culture / Books of the Month
Written by :
May 9, 2008
Tags :
new books
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| The Enchantress of Florence
Fabulous fable or the same old story?
AUTHOR: Salman Rushdie AVAILABLE: Now
salman Rushdie is up to his old tricks again. 'The Enchantress of Florence' features all the interwoven plotlines, improbable events and quirky characters (with even quirkier names) that readers have come to expect – along with a surprising helping of sex. However, not everyone has been enchanted. One reviewer in The Times (London) called it "Easily the worst thing Rushdie has ever written", and just as a bad joke told with a knowing wink is still a bad joke, it's hard to dispel the feeling that, for all its postmodern cleverness, Rushdie's habitual reliance on "classic" storytelling devices is at times little more than lazy literary shorthand. Not that 'The Enchantress of Florence' is entirely fanciful (it even includes a bibliography to emphasize its historical credentials) but whereas in 'Midnight's Children' and 'Shame' Rushdi ... ... |
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