Chinese Books

For readers who live in the United States and want to make authentic Chinese dishes, this Chinese/English cookbook, adorned with beautiful pictures, will certainly lure them out to the market and rush them back into the kitchen.

The book is categorized by main ingredients - pork, beef, poultry; fish, prawn, seafood, rice and noodles, snacks, vegetarian, vegetables, and bean curd.

The best feature of this book is the tips the author placed on the sidebar. I have found them to be the culinary secrets of how to make a dish as good as the ones turned out by the chef.

Dishes such as Bean Curd with Dried Shrimp, Curry Chicken Rice, Braised Fish Tail with Brown Sauce, Meat Dumpling in Chili Oil and Spring Onion Pancake are dishes you find in authentic Chinese restaurants. With the hint of the tips I have turned out better tasting and better looking dishes.

Some of the ingredients used in this book are fancy and exotic. You may want to go to a well-stocked Asian supermarket for them. It is really worth the trouble, though, because the dishes are the kind Chinese families put on their dinner tables. Your culinary effort will surely be the talk among your friends and families just like the ones I tried were.

Delicious, simple, step by step recipes. This book helped a novice like me turn into a good cook! A must buy!

This book is still very much available and in Print. One can also order the cassette that helps one learn the true Chinese diction of the words. There is a glossary of words in the book that are used on the cassette.
The author, Coleen Cain (formerly Beth Bauer) was a Journalist for the Post-Intelligencer of Bellevue, WA while she was living in China.
A member of the Seattle Free Lances, she has authored a number of other books as well.
I have used the book as a gift to friends visiting China.

This book is easy to follow and the receipes are great. I've really enjoyed it.

Buy the cheap one, no need for more. Beautiful pictures, practical information, great tips for off-the-grid home food growing in a sustainable method that is also fun and nice to look at. If more of us did this instead of buying asparagus from patagonia, we could slow global warming

Between the Hammer and the Anvil? Chinese and Russian Policies in Outer Mongolia, 1911-1921 by Thomas E.Ewing

A splendid book! After ten years of regular reading, and thumb marks on every page, these poems still catch my breath with their beauty and sorrow. As a lay reader (not a scholar) the poems are completely accessible, and beautifully evoke the human essence of an age in China which we otherwise would ever know. If the poems have a unifying theme, it might be the bittersweet pain of longing and separation - but the varicolored mix of imagery and beautiful choice of words by Julie Landau give each of them a unique flair, sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, always intriguing. This is my favorite book of poetry. Julie - another volume would be a gift to us all!

BEYOND THE SCREEN is an apt title; it describes this book both literally and metaphorically. Nancy Berliner and fourcontributing writers dissect both the life and furniture of sixtheen and seventeenth China in a work that combines art, craft and social history. My husband, an amateur woodworker, was fascinated with descriptions of workmanship and digrams of joinery. I preferred the sections that talked about the people -- both the craftsmen (usually anonymous) that made the furniture and the elite who commissioned it. But the focus point of the book is undoubtedly the photographs of the furniture itself -- some pieces which are classically simple, others that are intricately carved. Berliner comments at length on each piece. For collectors of antique Chinese furniture -- or reproductions -- this book is an absolute must-have. It gives the story behind the craft and makes sitting down so much more interesting!

A Bilingual Edition Of Poetry Out Of Communist China translated by Andrew G. Emerson is an engaging extensive collection of poetry and biographical information of renowned poet, accomplished writer, and acclaimed scholar Huang Xiang. Introducing American readers to a complete translation of Xiang's works, A Bilingual Edition Of Poetry Out Of Communist China deftly showcases an impressive body of vivid imagery, beautiful language, and distinctively lyrical rhetoric. Drifting (Sixteen Lines For My Hometown--Love of China): A blanket of snow still unmelted/A wooden fence damp but still sound//A sun halo faint, undispersed/A shepherd's pipe blown without cease//A mug of strong tea undiluted/A jug of wine never finished//A grave-stone where mourning continues/A will nearly dry but not dead//An anecdote told without end/A nursery-rhyme never grown up//A bodily stone undestroyed/A spot of ink not yet removed// A family attachment unbroken/An emotion held in unexpressed//A fever that will not go down/A life of blood-pressure too high.

Lin Domizio's Qi Baishi invites readers to enjoy a biographical narrative that is both visually sensational and textually rich. It illustrated with 20 water-ink paintings by Prof. Charles Chu. It reveals vividly the trajectory of Qi Baishi's life and his transformation from a herd boy of a poor family in Hunan Province to China's most popular literati artist in 20th century China. Graded level of this reader is 1,200 Chinese characters. "It is suitable for the first semester of third-year Chinese course at college level... This can also be used for AP Chinese courses. Students who have read Prof. Charles Chu's Ch'i Pai-shih in the past will likely enjoy this book even more," prefaced by Dr. Tao-chung Ted Yao.