Wang Books

Huge and heavy! I'm almost tempted to nick a star from my rating of it because of the mechanical stress on my elbows incurred while holding it up to read. It's definitely not a book to read in a few consecutive sessions, and don't even think of trying it on an exercycle, in bed, or on an airplane!

On the other hand, its size is its virtue, in presenting enormous quantities of archaeological and historical informative, based on the most recent excavations, discussed in eight independent chapters by leading Chinese scholars. The chapter titles are the best demonstration of the scope:
1) Early Humans in China
2) The Beginning of Farming
3) The Yangshao Perio: Prosperity and Transformation
4) The Formation of Civilization: Longshan Period
5) The Rise of Kings and the Formation of City-States
6) Society During the Three Dynasties
7) The Eastern Zhou and the Growth of Regionalism
8) The Formation of the Empire by the Qin and Han Dynasties

Most readers interested primarily in Chinese history might be wise to begin with chapter four or five; the first two chapters are a bit of a barrier, being highly technical and addressed to archaeological scholars. The remainder of the book is certainly scholarly, but accessible to ordinary mortals. The central theme of the essays as a whole is the multi-regional origin of Chinese civilization.

Aside from the mass of text such a huge volume can contain, the advantage of the large format is its large photos. This book is a veritable museum of photos of China's ancient cultural treasures: ceramics, bronze sculptures, burial bounty, and above all the best pictures I've seen of the terracotta armies of the Qin Emperor at Qin Shihuang and of the Han Emperor Jang in situ.

If ever you plan a visit to China - or to one of the great collections of Chinese art in the museums of San Francisco, Washington, or New York - a few weeks' reading of this volume will do a lot to make your expedition more fascinating and meaningful.

"The Formation of Chinese Civilization" reviews the archaeology of early China, from the earliest appearance of humans in the Paleolithic era, to the unification of the Chinese state in the Qin and Western Han dynasties. It is one of the volumes in Yale's China series. Organization is chronological, and each chapter is written by a different author. The book is beautifully illustrated, although the photos of museum objects are mostly "window dressing:" this is a book about archaeology, not art history.

Since the authors are all senior Chinese archaeologists, the reader will find authoritative commentary and an orthodox viewpoint throughout the book. Orthodoxy in this case means that the authors all subscribe to the idea that humans originated independently in China, and followed a civilizational development through progressive stages of matriarchy, patriarchy, slave society, etc., per standard Marxist theory. In practice, however, the authors' wide experience and knowledge more than compensate for any lingering ideological difficulties.

Although no one could accuse this book of being undersized, I found that many important topics were only touched on very briefly. Sanxingdui is given only one and one-half columns; only two columns for the Great Wall; the whole discussion of final Qin-Han unification is disappointingly short. In compensation, at least brief mention is made of numerous recent excavations that bear on the questions - of state formation and the development of Chinese civilization - addressed in this book. Some major conclusions are: the multi-regional nature of early China; cultural continuity from earliest times; the importance of religion (shamanism) in culture and politics; and the interplay between lineage (family) and territory in the formation of the Chinese state.

Although hardly for beginners, most serious students of Chinese archaeology will want to read through this volume.

I read this book when I was a child and would like to obtain a copy of it again one of these days. I no longer consider myself Christian, but these stories are told in an engaging and endearing way. As the previous reviewer stated, they are told by underprivileged youth and recorded by a rather open-minded pastor. The book is like a time capsule into how children spoke back in the fifties and sixties. It also includes a glossary in case you run into a word or phrase that totally stumps you. Warning to parents: Contains four-letter words. Street kids back then didn't have quite as "foul" a vocabulary as they do today, but if you control for the greater amount of civility in public speech in those days, I would guess the shock value back then was about the same as it is now.

This book offers a very interesting look into the minds of underprivileged youth, and into the ancient stories of the bible. This book is made up of children's interpretations of some of the most famous bible stories. The children who wrote the book were underprivileged juvenile delinquents, who were under the tutelage of an open-minded pastor. The book is incredible, and can help shed new light on the old stories that are sometimes hard to understand. A lot more fun than that "Scared Straight" program from TV. It's an incredibly original idea done extremely well.

Ask the average American where the words "the Golden Door" comes from and I suspect you'd be met with a blank state. It comes from the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to be free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden Door!" Roger Daniels' well researched and carefully nuance view of immigration to America since 1882 is a refreshingly even-handed assessment of America's immigration policies.

For those that wish to shut and lock the "golden door" it would be well to remember this wonderful sentiment from George Washington: "The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions, whom we shall welcome to participate in all of our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment."

The immigration issue is a divisive one in which more often than not we are faced with editorials stipulating that immigrant labor reduces the standard of living and opportunities of employment for all workers. But is this true? Are we not a nation of immigrants? If you want a better understanding of our policies and what this means to America please read this book.

I just finished reading "Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882" by Roger Daniels. It focus's most of it's attention on the expanding network of contradictory, unenforceable, political and often blatantly racist immigration laws passed in the United States since the first Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.
It is the best book on the history of US immigration policy that I have read to date. By looking at the history of immigration chronologically by period and then at the effects on groups within each period it makes it possible for the reader to grasp the flow of policy and events. Two areas that aren't well treated in the book are the effects of the various policies on those excluded and other than statistically how immigrant groups melded into the mainstream. The book therefore reads more as a textbook than as a compelling story. But it presents the data well and puts it in one place. The footnotes and the bibliography are both very complete and useful.
Daniels does have a few very interesting graphs. One on page 233 shows the changing attitude of Americans toward immigration over time. According to the Gallup Poll data negative attitudes toward immigration peaked in 1995 and attitudes have been improving since then. Of course the politicians and the bureaucrats have not yet adjusted their actions to this change of attitude.

This book of more than 800 pages is not a dictionary: better - it is an immense vocabulary book, with expressions, idioms, complete phrases - with pinyin and english translation. Plus the traditional characters for every new word, plus the stroke order, etc. So I think it could honestly be called 2, 3 thousands words!For those interested in learning the chinese language, it is a manual that must be always at hand. Really great!

I bought this with the aspiration of a great character dictionary and was slighty disappointed. While, it offers a good account of the most commonly used characters, it certainly doesn't offer the best methods for looking up those characters. It does however, present a large amount of example words and sentences associated with each character, this was a plus as most character dictionaries only focus on offering words used with the characters.

No colored tabs on the side, and limited indexes.

During my freshman year at the school of architecture, we examined Herzog & de Meuron's two houses to use them as a starting point for our 'room' designs. Their work is very impressive. The houses were the Koechlin House, in Switzerland and Kramlich House, in California. Both of them were quite comprehensive designs and yet with totally different approaches to their aims.

Koechlin House was designed as a three-story building, in which the top floor was the rotation of the trapezoid shaped-second floor, which formed the main movement in the house. The architects have brought the outside to inside, and inside to outside by placing movable huge glass windows, which are reflective as a mirror. The building's almost black color serves to the means of making it seem both visible and invisible at the same time to the people walking outside.

The other house, Kremlin House, was designed for two artists who were dealing with media art frequently. To this respect, Herzog & de Meuron, designed the house in such a way that all the walls within the house could be used as projection screens for the artists. To enhance the design, they've curved the walls to provide continuity to the works being projected. I believe that there cannot be any better solution than what the swiss architects have offered.

I've purchased the book to look at their other works, and I'm not disappointed at all. Their other works reflect similar level of quality, creativity and problem-solving. The book contains about 75-100 works of them, with all the essential information regarding the context, juxtaposed with self-explanatory pictures. Some of the bigger projects have plans and sections as well. The editor has included a couple of sections on the background of the architects, and a timeline of their work.

The book is in both german and english. Therefore, the amount of information revealed is halved, but it is still sufficient. The reason I'm rating this book with 4 stars is that I find the book somewhat dull and not-very-inviting than the usual charming architecture books. But, this is just my opinion, and this cannot hinder the book's value or success by any means. It is a good source of both Herzog & de Meuron, and general Swiss architecture, indeed.

Me fascinan los espacios minimalistas. Herzog & de Meuron, transmiten la esencia del lugar con materiales universales. los espacios se llenan de vida con el estudio de la luz.

As a grand son of jews that also took Bolivia (1910) as a Refuge from the madness of Pogroms in czarist Russia, I was since long ago interested in the following waves of forced jewish inmigration in this country. A soon as I read "Hotel Bolivia....", I commented it with some Austrian friends that live in Tarija, Bolivia to this very day and that came to Bolivia in 1938 in the same conditions as Spitzer's family. They all tell me that his description of that horrible time is very accurate (especially the Austrian pre-emigration period). Tarija is a small Department in the south of Bolivia which borders with Argentina. Here too, many Jews came in their way to Argentina, they were well treated and some stayed the rest of their lives, all of them respected by this community as hard-working and decent people. Some continued their journey to the USA or Argentina. Today, only 3 Jewish families (survivors) remain from that period and I would like to thank Leo Spitzer for a book that preserves a testimony of their lives in an objective and accurate perspective.

When many think of the land locked country of Bolivia, they think of narcotics, Nazi's and natural resources. Few think of Jews. But to Jews fleeing Europe after the Anschluss of 1938, Bolivia was the place about which to think. Bolivia offered a safe haven in a world of closed doors; at least 20,000 Jews found refuge in La Paz, Sucre, Oruro, Cochabamba during the War.

Leo Spitzer, a Professor of History at Dartmouth and specialist in cultural memory and gender studies, was born in La Paz in 1939, his parents having just fled their beloved Vienna. His book, Hotel Bolivia, succeeds in providing an enlightening look at the little known story of the Jewish refugee community in Bolivia; and also, for the most part, Spitzer accomplishes his goal to craft a meditation on the nature of individual and collective memories and the ability of people to adapt to their new environment.

Through interviews, testimonies, documents, diaries, and recollections, many rendered benign by the passing of time, Spitzer relates to us the stories of the refugees who never felt at home in Bolivia -- people who viewed themselves as refugees and not residents -- perceiving Bolivia as a transit station, a hotel by the name of Hotel Bolivia.

In 1938, Bolivia was still recovering from its devastating Chaco War with Paraguay. This Catholic country that was seventy percent Quechua and Aymara-speaking mestizos did know a little about Jews. Its liberator, President Antonio Jose de Sucre, was probably part crypto-Jewish, and Mauricio Hochschild, of German Jewish parentage, was one of Bolivia's wealthiest industrialists. Into this high altitude came over 20,000 Jewish refugees. While most gained entry in order to set up agricultural settlements, just a few hundred ever left the urban center of La Paz for the good earth of cooperative farming.

The story of Spitzer's own family's crossing from Genoa to La Paz is engrossing. Although Spitzer's grandfather Leopoldo, for whom he is named, died on the ship en route to Boli! via, the Spitzer family's shipboard photos and recollections are filled with optimism and are devoid of sorrow. Did the passage of time distort their memories? It was not until Spitzer discovered his father's captions on the obverse sides of the photos that he learned of his father's profound sadness of leaving his homeland (Heimat) and his extreme feelings of loss on losing his beloved father and having to bury him during a port call in Caracas. Spitzer sharply quotes journalist Herb Caen's observation, "Nostalgia is memory with the pain removed."

Leo, named for his grandfather who had died just a few weeks prior, became a link to the past in this new and alien land. The other refugees recreated several other links to their pasts, including the Circula Israelita, Austria Club, Juedische Jugendbund, Judische Gemeinde, and Macabi socials and sporting clubs.

Spitzer shows how the sinking of the refugee ship "Orazio" took on an amplified importance in the refugee community. Although most of the Orazio's passengers, who were en route to Bolivia, were rescued off the coast of France, the sinking came to represent the collective experience of all the Jewish refugees.

The most disconcerting passages in HOTEL BOLIVIA are those attributed to some of Bolivia's "German" Jewish leaders during the War, some of them laced with prejudice against the Ostjuden of Poland.

Today, with less than 1,500 Jews residing in Bolivia, and fewer than 100 of the original refugees, Leo Spitzer transmits an important story to us about forgotten refugees, their adaptations, their institutions, and their even leaders' attempts at communal farming.

How to Name Paint is a step-by-step introduction to the art of name painting using art forms for the letters of the English alphabet that both children and adults will enjoy. The book contains step by step instructions to the author who is trained in China and the example creations are indeed very appealing. You can see sample pages of the book and other books, kits by the same author at her website, [...]

I enjoyed looking at her art creations, though I did not try out anything myself.

In her companion book, Each letter of the alphabet is painted in five different styles in The Art of Name Painting (76 pages Softcover ISBN-13: 978-9791979-0-1 8.5 x 11 inches)

If you enjoy art, esp. painting, you can certainly go for this fun activity.

Name Painting has its origins in ancient Chinese calligraphy but is a relatively recent arrival to the United States having debut in New York City only a decade ago. The colors, images, and constantly evolving nature have elevated Name Painting to the status of a fine art form. Now with Linda Wang's unique and imaginative artistry, 'user friendly' instructions and illustrative examples, children and adults can learn how to create wonderful visual images using Name Painting techniques to transform a person's name into colorful figures and objects using water-based paints. Anyone can quickly and easily acquire the basic skills needed to transform anyone's name into true works of art.

Farming occupied the majority of American pursuits in the 19th century, tied up most of the nation's capital, and occupied the thoughts of farmers and politicians alike. Before expansion into the West could succeed, conservation of land and resources would have to be taken into account: Larding The Lean Earth points out that the debate over natural resource management began in the 1820s and pitted farmers against plantation owners in a conflict which would affect westward expansion processes as a whole.

When we think of the conservation movement in America, our minds are drawn to people such as John James Audubon, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Aldo Leopold. Although these men wrote with passion about conservation, the political movement had deeper roots. In his original and thought provoking book, Steven Stoll proposes that conservation thought emerged as a political force in the 19th century exploitation of the land. Two forces emerged - the improvers of the land who believed that farming practices must be used to sustain the soil, - and the emigrants who kept moving to new untouched wilderness as their land gave out. Today, most of the arable land is cultivated and much of it in North America is maintained by technology. Larding the Lean Earth explores how technology has come to dominate the agricultural landscape. It is a must read for anyone interested in the history of conservation, and anyone close to the land.

In 1601 John Marston, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and George Chapman were described as "the best and chiefest of our modern writers". Today, only English majors are likely to be acquainted with John Marston's works. Even his most popular play, The Malcontent (1604), is seldom encountered.

The Malcontent is often categorized as a revenge play, although it is quite unlike Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, or The Revenger's Tragedy (uncertain authorship). Even though deceit, betrayal, disguises, and attempted murders are essential elements of the plot, The Malcontent lacks the brutality that characterizes other Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge plays. Unexpectedly, as the play develops, Malevole, the disguised Duke of Genoa, shows some willingness to forgive others for their past injustices. The recovery and restoration of character becomes more important than revenge.

The Malcontent makes good reading. Cascading betrayals and unexpected twists maintained my interest throughout all five acts. Unlike many contemporaneous plays, the plot is not complicated by extraneous subplots. The action, although sometimes convoluted, is all tightly connected. All in all, I found the The Malcontent to be easier reading than most Elizabethan and Jacobean plays.

Induction: Act I is preceded by an Induction by John Webster, a six page witty discussion among five of the Globe Theatre actors (including Richard Burbage) regarding the author's intentions and recent modifications to the play itself. Apparently, The Malcontent had been previously staged by a rival theatre, the Children of the Queen's Revels at Blackfriars. While of interest to scholars in unraveling the early history of Marston's play, this induction is not germane to the plot itself.

Staging: In the introduction Bernard Harris, the editor of the New Mermaids edition, describes The Malcontent as "a theatrically ambitious and bewilderingly active play, rich in details of staging." Scenes require attendants, pages, lights, ladies, processions, music, dancing, costumes, jewelry, feasts, and even the devising of a masque.

Malevole, the title character of Marston's masterpiece, has good reason to be a malcontent: he is the disguised, deposed rightful ruler of Genoa. The play is a collection of intrigues, questions as to who knows what about whom, and disguises. It is a great joy to read and one of my favorite pieces of Renaissance literature.

The New Mermaid edition is very nice, with a good introduction, but the language has been modernized more than in most editions.

While taking an Anthropology class covering Mexican Americans we were asked to purchase this book along with another text book. I found Mexican Americans/American Mexicans to be a good book, with lots of useful and interesting information without being dry (like most text books).

I would recommend this book to anyone who would like to expand their basic knowledge concerning the critical role Mexican Americans have played in American history. I not only recommend this work to others, but also use it as a text in the internet based Mexican American history course I offer.