Showing posts with label china. Show all posts
Showing posts with label china. Show all posts
Nov 19, 2018
Jul 3, 2018
Oct 1, 2014
Restless Empire - Odd Arne Westad
Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 - Westad, Odd ArneSummary: A prize-winning historian and expert on Chinese foreign relations examines China's role in the world throughout recent centuries to demonstrate how its past is shaping the nation's future, explaining how Western influences have reinforced traditional Chinese mores while establishing potential international partnerships.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* With the largest national population and soon the largest national economy. China appears to most internal and external observers to stand on the precipice of world dominance. But as Bancroft Award winner Westad makes abundantly clear, China's eventual hegemony in the global marketplace may rely more on overcoming internal obstacles and on cooperating with its close neighbors the many challenges presented by an American-led West. Building a superb story of China's historically schizophrenic relationship with the outside world, Westad reaches back to the long twilight of the Qing dynasty, canvassing the nation's conflicts with Western imperialists, expansionist neighbors, and internal minorities and revealing a country in which the past threatens to overwhelm the present. However, it is the Chinese foreign-policy developments of the twentieth century, including the republic under Chiang Kai-shek, triumph of Mao's Communists, and economic transformation under Deng Xiaoping, that form the bulk of this compelling, expansive account. Westad has provided readers with both a remarkable and timely glimpse behind the curtain that is required reading for anyone interested in Chinese political history and economic development and the future of China's position in the international community.
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Dec 2, 2013
Boxers/Saints - Gene Luen Yang
Boxers/Saints - Yang, Gene Luen
Summary: Vibiana, an unwanted fourth child, finds her name and identity in Christianity, but with the Boxer Rebellion in full swing and Chinese Christians facing death, she must decide whether her loyalties lie with her religion or her country.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* In American Born Chinese (2006), Yang spoke to the culture clash of Chinese American teen life. In Saints—the concluding volume in a two-book set beginning with Boxers (2013)—about the Boxer Rebellion at the end of the nineteenth century in China, he looses twin voices in harmony and dissonance from opposite sides of the bloody conflict. Saints follows Four-Girl, an outcast in her own family, who embraces the Christian faith spreading through her country and places herself in the dangerous path of the Boxers. Between the two books, Yang ties tangled knots of empathy where the heroes of one become the monsters of the other. Four-Girl and her foil in Boxers, Little Bao, are drawn by the same fundamental impulses—for community, family, faith, tradition, purpose—and their stories reflect the inner torture that comes when those things are threatened. Yang is in superb form here, arranging numerous touch points of ideological complexity and deeply plumbing his characters' points of view. And in an homage to the driving power of stories themselves, Four-Girl is captivated by a vision sprung from lore: a young Frenchwoman clad in golden armor, Joan of Arc. Much blood is spilled as Four-Girl marches toward her grim fate, which is even more unsettling given that Yang hasn't fundamentally altered his squeaky clean, cartoonishly approachable visual style. A poignant, powerhouse work of historical fiction from one of our finest graphic storytellers. Copyright 2013 Booklist Reviews.
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Oct 1, 2013
China's wings - Gregory Crouch
China's wings - Crouch, Gregory
Summary: Documents the contributions of China's daredevil pilots before and during World War II, citing the pivotal contributions of American aviation executive William Langhorne Bond and his team in providing emergency supplies in spite of harrowing risks.
Booklist Reviews
In this thoroughly researched, readable history of the China National Aviation Corporation, Crouch includes everything from Pan Am's participation in a joint U.S.-Chinese venture to the actions of presidents and pilots, businessmen and Flying Tigers. But rather than writing simply a valuable business history, Crouch focuses on the actions of William Bond, Pan Am's man on the ground, who navigated cultural, political, and military clashes while trying to hold together a company that provided significant and profitable service. Straddling the periods before and after WWII, Crouch's account is full of gossipy reports of backroom dealmaking, adventure rooted in the execution of "the Hump" (the world's first strategic airlift), and a hefty dose of intrigue connected to Chairman Mao's ascension. Through it all, Crouch grounds the narrative in Bond's life, recording his travels, struggle to maintain relationships with his wife and children, and clashes with superiors. Crouch's significant study of an overlooked subject is important as both history and an illumination of the current, China-focused business environment. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.
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The valley of amazement - Amy Tan
Summary: Spanning more than forty years and two continents, The Valley of Amazement resurrects pivotal episodes in history: from the collapse of China’s last imperial dynasty, to the rise of the Republic, the explosive growth of lucrative foreign trade and anti-foreign sentiment, to the inner workings of courtesan houses and the lives of the foreign “Shanghailanders” living in the International Settlement, both erased by World War II.
Kirkus Reviews
Tan, who made her name with The Joy Luck Club (1989), blends two favorite settings, Shanghai and San Francisco, in a tale that spans generations. Granted that courtesans and the places that sheltered them were (and in some places still are) culturally significant in East Asia, Tan takes what might seem an unnecessary risk by setting her latest novel in that too-familiar demimonde (Miss Saigon, Memoirs of a Geisha, etc.). Tan is a skilled storyteller, capable of working her way into and out of most fictional problems, but the reader will be forgiven a sinking feeling at the scenario with which she opens, featuring "the only white woman who owned a first-class courtesan house in Shanghai." Where are the Boxers when you need them? Said white woman, Lulu Minturn, aka Lulu Mimi, is in Shanghai for a reason--and on that reason hinges a larger conceit, the one embodied by the book's title. She has a daughter, and the daughter, naturally enough, has cause to wonder about her ancestry, if little time to worry overmuch about some of the details, since her mom leaves her to fend for herself, not entirely willingly. The chinoiserie and exoticism aside, Violet makes a tough and compelling character, a sort of female equivalent to Yul Brynner as played by Lucy Liu. The members of the "Cloud Beauties," who give Violet her sentimental education, make an interesting lot themselves, but most of the attention is on Violet and the narrative track that finds her on a parallel journey, literally and figuratively, always haunted by "those damned paintings that had belonged to my mother" and that will eventually reveal their secrets. Tan's story sometimes suffers from longueurs, but the occasional breathless, steamy scene evens the score: "He lifted my hips and my head soared and I lost all my senses except for the one that bound us and could not be pulled apart." A satisfyingly complete, expertly paced yarn. Copyright Kirkus 2013 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.
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Apr 1, 2013
Restless Empire - Odd Arne Westad
Summary: A prize-winning historian and expert on Chinese foreign relations examines China's role in the world throughout recent centuries to demonstrate how its past is shaping the nation's future, explaining how Western influences have reinforced traditional Chinese mores while establishing potential international partnerships. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* With the largest national population and soon the largest national economy. China appears to most internal and external observers to stand on the precipice of world dominance. But as Bancroft Award winner Westad makes abundantly clear, China's eventual hegemony in the global marketplace may rely more on overcoming internal obstacles and on cooperating with its close neighbors thanany challenges presented by an American-led West. Building a superb story of China's historically schizophrenic relationship with the outside world, Westad reaches back to the long twilight of the Qing dynasty, canvassing the nation's conflicts with Western imperialists, expansionist neighbors, and internal minorities and revealing a country in which the past threatens to overwhelm the present. However, it is the Chinese foreign-policy developments of the twentieth century, including the republic under Chiang Kai-shek, triumph of Mao's Communists, and economic transformation under Deng Xiaoping, that form the bulk of this compelling, expansive account.Westad has provided readers with both a remarkable and timely glimpsebehind the curtain that is required reading for anyone interested in Chinese political history and economic development and the future of China's position in the international community. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.
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Mar 1, 2013
Death of a red heroine - Qui Xiaolong
Death of a red heroine - Xiaolong, Qui
Summary: Inspector Chen must battle the political climate of Shanghai and seek the help of a former lover in order to solve the murder of a National Model Worker who was a celebrity of utmost probity. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ The discovery of the body of a beautiful young woman in a canal 20 miles from Shanghai interrupts the housewarming party of Chief Inspector Chen Cao, one of the lucky few to obtain an apartment in the congested city. Cao is a food lover and a poetry lover (he has published a translation of T. S. Eliot, and he is reminded of bits of Chinese poetry even when investigating homicides). Cao is also the head of the Shanghai Police Bureau's Special Cases Squad, Homicide Division. Cao discovers that the victim was a National Model Worker, a role model used for propaganda purposes and recruitment by the Communist Party. The case is politically sensitive, and Cao is urged to do the impossible: solve the case without probing too deeply into the victim's personal life, the details of which may be embarrassing to the Party. The double bind facing the detective is the perfect backdrop for an extended exploration of the conflicts rooted in contemporary China. Xiaolong provides wonderful details of social polarization through his discussions of food, dress, housing. Cao himself is a complex, believable blend of someone devoted both to the flesh and to poetry, a sort of Chinese Maigret. Xiaolong, a Chinese poet and literary critic, is adept at threading social commentary of China in the 1990s with his detective's movements through social strata in search of the killer. Fascinating for what it reveals about China as well as what it reveals about a complex man in this setting. Xiaolong's first mystery may be the most impressive debut of the year. ((Reviewed May 1, 2000))Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews
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Feb 1, 2013
For all the tea in China - Sarah Rose
Summary: Rose's remarkable account follows the journey of Robert Fortune, a Scottish gardener, who was deployed by the British East India Company to steal China's tea secrets in 1848. This thrilling narrative combines history, geography, and old-fashioned adventure.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Through the adventures of Robert Fortune, a nineteenth-century plant hunter, the reader learns a delicious brew of information on the history of tea cultivation and consumption in the Western world. Rose's book is certain to draw the attention of history buffs, foodies, avid travel-literature fans, followers of popular science, and perhaps even business-interest book consumers as she reconstructs what she posits as the "greatest theft of trade secrets in the history of mankind." Tea was grown in China. Great Britain wanted tea. But trying to trade with the Celestial Empire was like pulling teeth. So the East India Company sent hunter Fortune, undercover (dressed in mandarin robes), to penetrate the depths of China and surreptitiously gather—steal, in other words—seeds and young plants and send them to India, where they would flourish in soil that was part of the British Empire. The author's bold conclusion to this remarkably riveting tale is that Fortune's "actions would today be described as industrial espionage," but nevertheless he "changeed the fate of nations." Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.
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Aug 1, 2012
A lady cyclist's guide to Kashgar - Suzanne Joinson
Summary: In 1923, Eva English and her devout sister Lizzie embark on a journey to be missionaries in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar, while in modern-day London, a young woman's act of kindness to a Yemeni refugee results in an unexpected journey.
Booklist Reviews
Joinson's debut opens with a dramatic birth whose repercussions are felt for decades. The novel begins in 1923, with the story of two missionary sisters, Eva and Lizzie English. The pair and their leader, Millicent, are traveling to the Chinese city of Kashgar, where they will serve as missionaries and where Eva hopes to secretly write a cycling guide. Their journey is irrevocably altered when Millicent assists a young girl giving birth. When Eva, Lizzie, and Millicent are suddenly detained after the mother's death, their future remains uncertain. Shifting to modern-day London, Joinson picks up the story of Middle Eastern scholar Frieda, who returns home after months of travel to discover that an apartment has been left to her by a woman she has never met. Alternating between Frieda's and Eva's voices, Joinson slowly reveals what connects Frieda to the fateful desert birth decades before. This complex and involving historical novel examines the idea of home, the consequences of exile, the connection between mother and daughter, and the power dynamics of sexual relationships. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.
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Jul 1, 2012
They eat puppies, don't they? - Christopher Buckley
Summary: Starting a rumor about an assassination plot targeting the Dalai Lama as part of an effort to gain support for a secret weapons system, Bird McIntyre and Angel Templeton provoke Washington crises that bring the United States and China to the brink of war.
Booklist Reviews
In his latest novel of bull's-eye political satire, Buckley (Supreme Courtship, 2008) skewers our adversarial yet symbiotic relationship with China, along with the corruption endemic to lobbying, weapons manufacturing, and media spin. Walter "Bird" McIntyre, lobbyist for an aerospace behemoth, is instructed to "whip up . . . anti-Chinese fervor" to help secure government funding for a new secret weapon. Hapless and endearing, Bird divides his time between the condo he calls the Military-Industrial Duplex and the country estate he dubbed Upkeep, home to his equestrian wife, Alzheimer's-afflicted mother, and freeloading brother Bewks, a Civil War reenactor, while writing egregiously clichéd thrillers. Bring on sexy-scary hawk and neocon Angel Templeton, and Bird is in more trouble than he concocts for his tough-guy heroes. Vicious confrontations break out on Chris Matthews' Hardball, the Dalai Lama is in peril, and the eminently reasonable president of China can talk with his trusted aide only in the bathroom with the water running full blast to foil their enemies' listening devices. Buckley balances bayonet humor and tenderness in this canny and diverting send-up. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.
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Apr 1, 2012
The corpse walker - Yiwu Liao
Summary: "A compilation of twenty-seven extraordinary oral histories that opens a window, unlike any other, onto the lives of ordinary, often outcast, Chinese men and women. Liao Yiwu (one of the best-known writers in China because he is also one of the most censored) chose his subjects from the bottom of Chinese society: people for whom the 'new' China--the China of economic growth and globalization--is no more beneficial than the old. Here are a professional mourner, a trafficker in humans, a leper, an abbot, a retired government official, a former landowner, a mortician, a feng shui master, a former Red Guard, a political prisoner, a village teacher, a blind street musician, a Falun Gong practitioner, and many others--people who have been battered by life but who have managed to retain their dignity, their humor, and their essential, complex humanity. Liao's interviews were given from 1990 to 2003."--From amazon.com.
Booklist Reviews
Poet and novelist Liao, imprisoned for four years by the Chinese government for his poem condemning the massacre at Tiananmen Square, offers intimate portraits of ordinary people in China. Using interviews with hundreds of villagers whose lives have not benefited from the astounding economic growth of the new China, he offers oral histories of their lives lived day to day. Among his interview subjects are professional mourners, a former Red Guard, a trafficker in women, a grave robber, and a former political prisoner. Liao talked to people in villages where traditions have changed little as well as those where the old ways have clashed with the Revolution. A man recounts how fear of leprosy and evil dragons prompted villagers to burn his wife alive. The shocked husband was then obligated to feed them at a festival afterward. A retired government official recounts the hardships during the Cultural Revolution, the passion of the villagers and the hypocrisy of leaders, and the need for an honest assessment and apology. Liao offers rich detail about people who live well outside the spotlight trained on China. Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.
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China in ten words - Hua Yu
Summary: Uses a framework of ten common phrases in the Chinese vernacular to offer insight into China's modern economic gaps, cultural transformations, and ubiquitous practices of deception.
Library Journal Reviews
Yu is one of contemporary China's most celebrated but controversial writers. With much wit and elegance, he reminisces here in separate pieces (only one has been previously published) about his country's experiences over the past several decades, using personal stories as well as a piercing, critical examination of China's political, economic, and social transformation from what was essentially a Third World state into a superpower. Best known for his novels, e.g., Brothers, which satirize the country's moral depredation and its devolution into a hypercapitalist society, Yu chooses ten phrases—"people," "leader," "reading," "writing," "Lu Xun," "disparity," "revolution," "grassroots," "copycat," and "bamboozle"—that capture what he sees as China's most pressing issues over the last 60 years. His commentary is wide and varied, touching on everything from the country's severe economic and social disparity since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s to his own rise from uneducated, small-town "teeth puller" to one of the most highly regarded writers of his time. VERDICT A marvelous book for those interested in contemporary China, by one of China's foremost intellectuals.—Allan Cho, Univ. of British Columbia Lib., Vancouver
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Mar 1, 2012
Oracle bones - Peter Hessler
Summary: "[This book] tells the story of modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world as seen through the lives of a handful of ordinary people"--Dust jacket.
Booklist Reviews
Hessler, who has lived in China for the past nine years and is the Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker, has written a fascinating and frequently moving account of life in modern China as seen through the eyes of an eclectic group of people, including a minority Uighur, who operates on the fringe of legality, a factory worker, a teacher, a film director, and a scholar who was destroyed by the Cultural Revolution. All of them seem to function as outsiders as they struggle to cope with a nation that is undergoing monumental change. Hessler seamlessly interweaves their stories with the broader context of Chinese contemporary events, and he ties those events effectively with examinations of history, archaeological excavations, and the Chinese struggle to redefine national identity. This is an important and informative work offering a unique perspective on where China may be headed. ((Reviewed April 15, 2006)) Copyright 2006 Booklist Reviews.
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Jan 2, 2012
For the win - Cory Doctorow
Summary: A group of teens from around the world find themselves drawn into an online revolution arranged by a mysterious young woman known as Big Sister Nor, who hopes to challenge the status quo and change the world using her virtual connections.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Doctorow is indispensable. It's hard to imagine any other author taking on youth and technology with such passion, intelligence, and understanding. Although perhaps less urgent than Little Brother (2008), this effort is superior in every other aspect: scope, plot, character, and style. Set in the near future and in locations across the globe (though primarily China and India), the story involves a sweeping cast of characters making a living—if you want to call brutal conditions and pitiful wages a "living"—in such virtual-game worlds as Svartalfheim Warriors and Zombie Mecha. Many of them, like 15-year-old Mala (known by her troops as "General Robotwalla"), endure physical threats from their bosses to farm virtual gold, which is then sold to rich First World gamers. Then these brilliant teens are brought together by the mysterious Big Sister Nor, who has a plan to unionize and bring these virtual worlds—and real-world sweatshops, too—to a screeching halt. Once again Doctorow has taken denigrated youth behavior (this time, gaming) and recast it into something heroic. He can't resist the occasional lecture—sometimes breaking away from the plot to do so—but thankfully his lessons are riveting. With it's eye-opening humanity and revolutionary zeal, this ambitious epic is well worth the considerable challenge. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.
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Oct 1, 2011
Dreams of joy - Lisa See
Summary: Reeling from newly uncovered family secrets, and anger at her mother and aunt for keeping them from her, Joy runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father, the artist Z.G. Li, with whom both May and Pearl were once in love. Dazzled by him, and blinded by idealism and defiance, Joy throws herself into the New Society of Red China, heedless of the dangers in the communist regime.
Booklist Reviews
See continues the irresistible saga of May, Pearl, and Pearl's daughter, Joy, in a novel set in the immediate aftermath of the emotional events that brought her immensely popular Shanghai Girls (2009) to a fevered conclusion. Reeling with the revelation of her mother's true identity and burdened with the belief that she alone caused her father's suicide, Joy hastily flees Hollywood via a one-way ticket to the People's Republic of China. There she plans to search for her biological father and "beautiful girl" artist Li Zhi-ge, and immerse herself in the communist lifestyle, the rhetoric of which she embraced as a college student. Once she discovers what Joy has done, Pearl travels back to Shanghai at great personal risk to try and locate her daughter and convince her to return home. Both women find a nation in the throes of Chairman Mao's "Great Leap Forward" campaign, and immediately are catapulted into lives of unspeakable deprivation and gut-wrenching horror. Through the sobering experiences of a naive young girl and the sacrificial actions of her mother, See paints a vivid, haunting, and often graphic portrait of a country, and family, in crisis. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The eagerly awaited sequel to the reading-group favorite Shanghai Girls is supported by intensive marketing efforts. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.
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Sep 1, 2011
Mao's last dancer - Cunxin Li
Summary: Chosen from millions of children to serve in Mao's cultural revolution by studying at the Beijing Dance Academy, Li knew ballet would be his family's best opportunity to escape the bitter poverty in his rural China home. From one hardship to another, Li persevered, never forgetting the family he left behind.
Kirkus Reviews
A prominent ballet dancer revisits the strange course that led him from a Chinese hamlet to the world stage.Mix Billy Elliott with Torn Curtain and you'll have some of the tale in very broad outline. Born in 1961, Li lived his early years under the shadow of Mao's Great Leap Forward, which had impoverished the already poor countryside to an almost unbelievable extent. "Dried yams were our basic food for most of the year," Li writes. "We occasionally had flour and corn bread for a treat, but those were my [mother's] special reserves for relatives or important visitors. . . . Dried yams were the most hated food in my family, but there were others in the commune that could not even afford dried yams. We were luckier than most." Luck came in another form when Madame Mao decided that recruiting ballet dancers from the provinces would prove to the world that Chinese Communism was truly egalitarian, whereupon Li was packed off to dance school. "The officials mentioned ballet," he writes, "but all I knew about ballet was what I'd seen in the movie The Red Detachment of Women." Willing but slow to learn ("I was considered a laggard by most of my teachers," he writes with characteristic modesty), Li eventually found his feet, at the same time finding a purpose: "to serve glorious communism." One exchange trip to Texas, though, and Li, now in his late teens, was ready for something else. Li's well-paced account of the ensuing cloak-and-dagger episodes that led to his defection to the West adds suspense to a tale already full of adventures, but there are no conventional bad guys to be found in it. Indeed, he writes with fine compassion for the Chinese consul who attempts to dissuade him from becoming an outcast; "unlike me, he had to go back and would probably never manage to get out again."Nicely written and humane: for anyone interested in modern Chinese history or for fans of dance. Copyright Kirkus 2004 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.
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