China Books

Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China

Jung Chang

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 352 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

I liked the book, but it may not be for you. 3 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I have mixed feelings about the book Wild Swans. It certainly was not a page turner, rather it was a book I could lay down at any time, and even walk away from for a couple of days, which I did a number of times. It didn't read like a novel, as some memoir/biographies do, rather it was as though the author, Jung Chang was narrating to me the history of her family, beginning with her grandmother. The narration is well written, but long, and ends when she is 26. A short epilogue at the end then updates you as to what she has done with her life in the 10 years following the writing of the book. So if you are looking for a wildly entertaining book you can hardly put down, this is not a book for you.

Having said this, I do not consider reading the book was time wasted. If you are at all interested in the history of China, especially what it was like under Mao's years in power, you would find many fascinating passages in the book. Of course most of us know that Mao was not good for the people of China, but I was truly surprised at what all went on under Mao and his wife. Some of it was so strange, that it seemed down right bizarre to me, such as when Mao determined that grass and beautiful things should be removed from the cities. People all over China were pulling up flowers and grass. Students even spent school time out in the yard pulling up the grass. Reading the book was a learning experience about a time that it turned out I really knew very little about.

Editorial Review:

In Wild Swans Jung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century. Chang's grandmother was a warlord's concubine. Her gently raised mother struggled with hardships in the early days of Mao's revolution and rose, like her husband, to a prominent position in the Communist Party before being denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself marched, worked, and breathed for Mao until doubt crept in over the excesses of his policies and purges. Born just a few decades apart, their lives overlap with the end of the warlords' regime and overthrow of the Japanese occupation, violent struggles between the Kuomintang and the Communists to carve up China, and, most poignant for the author, the vicious cycle of purges orchestrated by Chairman Mao that discredited and crushed millions of people, including her parents.

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

Maxine Hong Kingston

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 170 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Prepare for the unexpected. 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This is a tremendous novel. The author threads the stories her mother told her when she was a child, through the retelling of her own life, using them to draw you into her own imagination. As she grows up, living half immersed in traditional myth and half in gritty reality, where mothers and daughters are only human, the reader grows up with her. The first person telling of her childhhood stories puts the reader directly in the shoes of a child/young adult working through the stories she has been told, using them to form her hopes and dreams and her understanding of the world.

(N.B. You may not think that your childhood stories influenced the way you live, but if you think for a minute, I am certain some will come back to you and you'll realize that just the other day you did something based on or combatting that belief. Maybe you even still wish on stars?)

Editorial Review:

The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts"--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain.

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom

Simon Winchester

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 41 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman ("Elegant and scrupulous"—New York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa ("A mesmerizing page-turner"—Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically advanced country.

No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student, with whom he began a lifelong affair.

He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded the ever-enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest frontiers of this ancient empire. He searched everywhere for evidence to bolster his conviction that the Chinese were responsible for hundreds of mankind's most familiar innovations—including printing, the compass, explosives, suspension bridges, even toilet paper—often centuries before the rest of the world. His thrilling and dangerous journeys, vividly recreated by Winchester, took him across war-torn China to far-flung outposts, consolidating his deep admiration for the Chinese people.

After the war, Needham was determined to tell the world what he had discovered, and began writing his majestic Science and Civilisation in China, describing the country's long and astonishing history of invention and technology. By the time he died, he had produced, essentially single-handedly, seventeen immense volumes, marking him as the greatest one-man encyclopedist ever.

Both epic and intimate, The Man Who Loved China tells the sweeping story of China through Needham's remarkable life. Here is an unforgettable tale of what makes men, nations, and, indeed, mankind itself great—related by one of the world's inimitable storytellers.

Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China

Philip P. Pan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post and one of the leading China correspondents of his generation comes an eloquent and vivid chronicle of the world's most successful authoritarian state -- a nation undergoing a remarkable transformation.

Philip P. Pan's groundbreaking book takes us inside the dramatic battle for China's soul and into the lives of individuals struggling to come to terms with their nation's past -- the turmoil and trauma of Mao's rule -- and to take control of its future. Capitalism has brought prosperity and global respect to China, but the Communist government continues to resist the demands of its people for political freedom.

Pan, who reported in China for the Post for seven years and speaks fluent Chinese, eluded the police and succeeded in going where few Western journalists have dared.

From the rusting factories in the industrial northeast to a tabloid newsroom in the booming south, from a small-town courtroom to the plush offices of the nation's wealthiest tycoons, he tells the gripping stories of ordinary men and women fighting for political change. An elderly surgeon exposes the government's cover-up of the SARS epidemic. A filmmaker investigates the execution of a young woman during the Cultural Revolution. A blind man is jailed for leading a crusade against forced abortions carried out under the one-child policy.

The young people who filled Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989 saw their hopes for a democratic China crushed in a massacre, but Pan reveals that as older, more pragmatic adults, many continue to push for justice in different ways. They are survivors whose families endured one of the world's deadliest famines during the Great Leap Forward, whose idealism was exploited during the madness of the Cultural Revolution, and whose values have been tested by the booming economy and the rush to get rich.

The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge Illustrated Histories)

Patricia Buckley Ebrey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Good Reference; Not Detailed 4 out of 5 stars.
14 of 15 people found this review helpful.

I used this book as a reference text for a course in Ancient Chinese History. The labeled illustrations are a pretty good reference for the components of the class that require us to identify and date archaeological pieces. Ebrey does a good job giving an overview of all the various things happening in China, however, it truly only skims the surface. In addition, points of controversy are not really discussed. Among the academia, there is debate of one of the groups of Chinese people- the Xia. In this book, Ebrey identifies the Xia as a group that does exist. Depending on who your professor is, you might get a different spin on the situation and the Xia might be considered mythical. While this isn't a serious point of contention, there might be other discrepanicies like this between what Ebrey writes and what others think.

Now this may be nitpicky, but the book doesn't do very well with sitting in a backpack. If you intend to take take it around with you, you'd be better of buying a hardcover version. The binding comes loose relatively easily and it's printed on this beautiful, heavy, glossy paper.

Buy this book only if you're looking for a quick read and a good reference.

Editorial Review:

To compress 8,000 years of a civilization's life into a single volume is a daunting task, but University of Illinois historian Patricia Ebrey does the job with authority and considerable flair. Writing with an eye to explaining recurring themes in Chinese history, she discusses ideas of order and statecraft, resource allocation and use, imperialism and population growth. Along the way she makes interesting asides, noting, among other things, that the Mongol conquerors of China monopolized the bamboo trade because they did not want the ethnic Chinese to make weapons, and she gives stimulating overviews of such matters as the manufacture of silk, hardwood furniture, and ceramics.

1421: The Year China Discovered America (P.S.)

Gavin Menzies

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 248 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

"Facts" 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This book is based on misconceived ideas and supported by "facts" that make no sense if you have any historical knowledge. No historian backs Menzies in this book or 1434.

Finally some answers! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I've been interested in different aspects of history for quite some time but the book, "1421: The Year China Discovered America" is the first to really light up my imagination! Gavin Menzies' writing style is almost conversational making it an easy read but he has included enough references and quotes to thoroughly prove his premise that the Chinese discovered and mapped the world long before the European explorers "discovered" anything. I recommend 1421 to even the most casual history buffs as I believe his view of world exploration explains many of the questions that have been raised over the years.

Editorial Review:

On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China to "proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas." When the fleet returned home in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in the long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. And they colonized America before the Europeans, transplanting the principal economic crops that have since fed and clothed the world.

The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed

Michael Meyer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A fascinating, intimate portrait of Beijing through the lens of its oldest neighborhood, facing destruction as the city, and China, relentlessly modernizes.

Soon we will be able to say about old Beijing that what emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist planners couldn’t eradicate, the market economy has. Nobody has been more aware of this than Michael Meyer. A long-time resident, Meyer has, for the past two years, lived as no other Westerner—in a shared courtyard home in Beijing’s oldest neighborhood, Dazhalan, on one of its famed hutong (lanes). There he volunteers to teach English at the local grade school and immerses himself in the community, recording with affection the life stories of the Widow, who shares his courtyard; coteacher Miss Zhu and student Little Liu; and the migrants Recycler Wang and Soldier Liu; among the many others who, despite great differences in age and profession, make up the fabric of this unique neighborhood.

Their bond is rapidly being torn, however, by forced evictions as century-old houses and ways of life are increasingly destroyed to make way for shopping malls, the capital’s first Wal-Mart, high-rise buildings, and widened streets for cars replacing bicycles. Beijing has gone through this cycle many times, as Meyer reveals, but never with the kind of dislocation and overturning of its storied culture now occurring as the city prepares to host the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Weaving historical vignettes of Beijing and China over a thousand years through his narrative, Meyer captures the city’s deep past as he illuminates its present. With the kind of insight only someone on the inside can provide, The Last Days of Old Beijing brings this moment and the ebb and flow of daily lives on the other side of the planet into shining focus.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China (P.S.)

Peter Hessler

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Love it 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I enjoyed the book very much because author use his point of view to describe his journey through his students, friends and travel through out the China abut the feeling toward past, today and the future of China.

An enjoyable read 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I brought this book with me when I moved to Shanghai, China and eventually got around to reading after 2 months of living here. I have previously studied many of the topics he had touch base upon in his book, from the history of oracle bones, to the current politics (such as Xinjiang's struggle for independence). I even took a class once (ancient history of china) where a professor had criticized the book for being misinformed on its information regarding the oracle bones. All this considered, I kept an open mind when reading Mr. Hessler's novel and ended up enjoying it greatly.

I enjoyed the fact that Mr. Hessler took a different route when writing this book. He focused a lot on the individual stories of Chinese citizens, while sliding in factual events, history, and culture. This made the book as enjoyable as a fiction novel. Most of the facts in the book were previously known to me, so in some ways, I was a bit disappointed (looking forward to enhance my knowledge on the region). But like I said, it was the individual people he met on his journeys through China that made the book a page-turner. I would suggest this book for anyone who has any interest in China, or just a good story about a different culture. If you are in the Asian/Chinese studies field you may find this book a little below your level. Although you may, like me, end up enjoying it for what it is, entertaining!

Editorial Review:

A century ago, outsiders saw China as a place where nothing ever changes. Today the country has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. In Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler explores the human side of China's transformation, viewing modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes.

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II

Iris Chang

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 635 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

An Emotive, Powerful and Well-Researched Piece 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I had known about this book for quite some time, but only got around to reading it recently. You need quite a bit of mental fortitude to get through such a book; it is graphic in the extreme. I stealed myself for the effort, but got quite upset by about page 80. The accounts of savagery - gang rape almost always followed by murder, dousing people with gas and setting them alight, bayoneting practice, ad infinitum - require a kind of mental detachment that may be hard to summon. But the book is much, much more than accounts from diaries, etc., although these are fascinating. There is all sorts of research here; interesting tidbits on everything from the manner in which the city of Nanjing was abandoned by Chiang Kai-shek to the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal to CCP spin on the atrocities after it came to power to the incredible efforts to deny and cover up the event in Japan. I seldom use the phrase 'page-turner' to decribe a book (it's a bit cliche, no?), but that's what this book is; one mind-boggling, shocking scenario after another, brimming with facts and examples all penned in a fine style. The subtitle, 'The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,' is apt, not some marketing ploy. The parts about John Rabe alone, a Nazi living in Nanjing at the time, who did whatever he could to save people's lives (including inform Adolf Hitler of the genocide), make this worth reading. The Rape of Nanking is a fascinating "lost chapter" of twentieth century world history.

Editorial Review:

China has endured much hardship in its history, as Iris Chang shows in her ably researched The Rape of Nanking, a book that recounts the horrible events in that eastern Chinese city under Japanese occupation in the late 1930s. Nanking, she writes, served as a kind of laboratory in which Japanese soldiers were taught to slaughter unarmed, unresisting civilians, as they would later do throughout Asia. Likening their victims to insects and animals, the Japanese commanders orchestrated a campaign in which several hundred thousand--no one is sure just how many--Chinese soldiers and noncombatants alike were killed. Chang turns up an unlikely hero in German businessman John Rabe, a devoted member of the Nazi party who importuned Adolf Hitler to intervene and stop the slaughter, and who personally saved the lives of countless residents of Nanking. She also suggests that the Japanese government pay reparations and apologize for its army's horrific acts of 60 years ago.

The Web That Has No Weaver : Understanding Chinese Medicine

Ted J. Kaptchuk

Amazon Price: $14.93 List Price: $21.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: McGraw-Hill Amazon Marketplace: 56 new & used starting at $11.00

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Good book, but not for an introduction to TCM... 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

With all due respect, this is NOT an "easy" read for the beginner!

I admit it, this book was also recommended for me before starting school, however I don't even think I completely finished it.

Too much info in such a small book! However, for the 1st year student, I would recommend it after 1-2 semesters.

However, this is one of the FIRST INTRO BOOKS written in the 70's.

Thank you for setting the course!

Still a Mystery to Me 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

For the last several years I ended the winter with coughing fits and lung congestion, for which I sought and received the usual western remedies, which proved somewhat useful. But the congestion usually remains, with my coughing and hacking provoking my wife to nag me into seeing her herbalist/acupuncture practitioner, who invariably succeeded where my western medicine had failed. I finally asked the herbalist/L.Ac. to recommend something which explained the workings of Oriental Medicine, and he recommended this book. Although I'm now familiar with concepts such as qi, yin and yang, I find that, even armed with this book, I'm still mystified, and find I still must uncomfortably rely on simple belief that my L.Ac. knows what he's doing, since the logic of these treatment protocols still eludes me.

Editorial Review:

Completely and thoroughly revised, The Web That Has No Weaver is the classic, comprehensive guide on the theory and practice of Chinese medicine. This accessible and invaluable resource has earned its place as the foremost authority in the synthesizing of Western and Eastern healing practices.