Wang Books

What the authors call fritz-studies is a research project, in which this fine book is only the first step. They have also a german/english website under the same title as the book, which might be a good addition to this catalogue. Just search with google for Sondermodelle and you will find it and get further information.

Wei, the child in this story, is the son and grandson of Chinese opera singers. At the beginning of the story, he idolizes the way of life his father and friends lead. His father, however, is nervous about the future of the Chinese opera in the new world, and steers his son towards excellence at school. His grandfather, however, secretly teaches Wei how to sing. The crucial difference between Wei's father and grandfather is that the former always sings the male roles and the latter always the female.

After his grandfather leaves, Wei is forced to see the downside of his father's job and what the opera's fading popularity might mean to his father and his own future. At the end of the story, Wei is able to save the day (or at least the performance), but the reader is left uneasy about Wei's (and his community's) future.

Though the author does not belabor the issues, he does drop hints about immigration, prejudice and class differences. While these might be lost on a younger reader, they will provide food for thought (and hopefully discussion) for the slightly older reader.

The novel arrived quickly and was at a fair price and met my expectations. -- norman Michaud

This is a very nice review of Race relations in 19th century Brazil, that I read in Portuguese when launched down here in 1993. The author has captured the nature of racial relations in Brazil through a multidiscplinar view. The subject by itself is fascinating and Ms. Schwarcz did a very good job. Although conventional wisdom says that there is no such a thing as a racial problem in Brazil, Ms. Schwarcz shows that this is the careful result of an ideological construct designed to mask huge problems enrooted in Brazil's story. As she shows, in 19th century Brazil's racial relations were close to an "apartheid" regime, similar to the one that existed until recently in South Africa.

This book nicely summarize the current state of the art of non-parametric spectral estimation techniques for the missing sample case. It is well written and informative. I would recommend it to researchers and practitioners in the field.

"The Cavern is one of M. Anouilh's most audacious experiments. M. Anouilh puts himself on the stage as the guileful conjuror who fumblingly tells the audience that he thinks his tricks will not come off. He talks so persuasively...that one begins to believe that his old skill has apparently deserted him. It really does look as if the story of the murder of the seduced cook, of the aristocratic indifference of her employers, and of the distresses of her seminarist son is going to miss its effect. But M. Anouilh is of corse only playing with us. He has the greatest natural genius for the stage of any man living, and when the moment comes, the knife is once again planted unerringly in our stomachs and our guts come tumbling out" - The Sunday Times (London)
--- from book's back cover

This book will delight even the youngest "reader" with its simple language, and the bright, cheerful illustrations (also by the author).

I'm so glad that her books are finally coming back into print!

As a graduate student in epidemiology who is incessantly looking for better ways to learn abstract concepts in statistics, I highly recommend this book by Elisa Lee. It's one of the few books that I found which explains advanced level statistics, such as parametric and non-parametric analysis, in a way that non-statisticans like myself can understand. It's also a handy reference to have at your side while reading the methods section of journal articles.

Scholarship on China has tended to mainly focus on social elites when describing urban life in the imperial and early Republican eras. One of the most famous exceptions to this is Jacques Gernet's 'Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250- 1276'. While a few other studies on commoners' everyday lives exist, they tend to focus on coastal cities. Very little scholarship in this area has been done on China's inland urban areas. Wang Di's book marks a major attempt to remedy this dearth of research.

The main concern of the study is to display how life in public spaces was transformed during the early twentieth century, from a place were pedestrians freely joined together during the late 1800's, to a place that became increasingly regulated and politicalized throughout the early 1900's. To describe this Wang uses "three major thematic points".

First, Wang describes how the Qing bureaucratic structure reached only to the county level and as a result had little control over street life. Neighborhoods were organized by the "baojia" system, an informal organization of households in a community participating in keeping local order. The "baojia" system gave commoners freedom to gather in public spaces for a "range of activities associated with commerce, everyday life, and ceremonies"(p.24). Also teahouses and voluntary organizations played an important role in communities.

The second thematic point is the urban reforms of the early twentieth century attempting to regulate street life and as a result altering the relationship between the local elites and commoners (for a discussion of these reforms see Kristin Stapleton's 'Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform 1895-1937', 2000). Although these reforms brought about positive changes overall in leisure activities, material life, and public spaces, Wang believes they nonetheless led to the events of 1911.

The third point describes this phenomenon. The regulation of commoners' public activities that accompanied the reforms caused ordinary citizens to become involved in political struggles. "The year 1911 symbolized commoners' political participation and the transformation from street culture to street politics, which radically affected their daily lives. From then on, the streets were frequently used for political purposes, and ordinary residents were forced to live in the shadows of relentless power struggles"(p.221, also see Robert Kapp's 'Szechwan and the Chinese Republic: Provincial Militarism and Central Power 1911-1938', 1973).

'Street Culture in Chengdu' is rich in its description of everyday life about numerous segments of society during late Qing and early Republican Chengdu. Sections on teahouse culture (the role they played in people's everyday life) and women's role in society (the changes brought about by urban reforms) are particularly interesting.

This collaborative book between Hughes and De Carava is small and wonderful. The story by Hughes is a gentle tale of one woman's life in Harlem in 1955. It is richly illustrated with the beautiful photographs of Harlem family life by De Carava.