China Books

One Year in Beijing is a children's picturebook that takes the reader on a month-by-month journey of what it's like to live in China's capital city, as seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old girl. Author Xiaohong Wong grew up in Beijing in the hope that sharing what adolescence in Beijing is like will inspire children worldwide to learn more about what happens beyond their own backyards. Simple, iconic illustrations add a visual touch to the descriptions of seasonal activities in this enriching blend of story and memoir.

A great book to have for those who want to understand holidays and basic customs of China. For approximately age 6 and up, a little advanced for age 5, but still great, just gloss over what is too advanced for now. Fabulous illustrations by wonderful Grace Lin, a very decorated book. I sent this to Kindergarten for my daughter's teacher to review Chinese New Year with the class. I sent in Red Envelopes with chocolate coins and pinwheels and a little card with Sagwa. The kids loved it and the teacher was excited to be offered the opportunity to learn more herself about the holiday and share it with the class.

What a wonderful book. This is our fourth Grace Lin book, and it is currently my two-year-old daughter's favorite. Grace Lin's illustrations are so visually appealing and creative. The book provides great information about various Chinese holidays, Chinese culture, and points of interest around Beijing. This book would make a wonderful gift for a Chinese American child or a child of any background!

This book is mainly about the holidays celebrated each month in China. I was expecting it to be more about everyday life in the city of Beijing.

I really liked this book, but I don't know if it is for beginners just learning about Buddhism. It is done in a very scholarly way and gives points and details from scripture. So I would recommend that you get more familiar with Buddhism before this book so then you can appreciate to the fullest. Overall though this book is a great way to get your teeth into the sutras look on meditation and begin perhaps studing the older texts.

It is an excellent book for anyone who wishes to deepen one's spiritual cultivation. It emphasizes on the importance the three trainings i.e. morality, meditation and wisdom to be practiced concurrently. After reading and reflecting on the knowledge that I have benefitted from this book, it has helped me in my daily meditation practice. It is my opinion that anyone who wishes to practice meditation seriously should read this book and reflect on it, as no happiness surpasses inner peace.

As a novice, I found this book very helpful. It provides very concrete guidance in meditation. And it also provides useful information on other aspects of Buddhism presented in a very easy to read and understandable manner. I highly recommend this book for meditation novices.

This book is a very good and comprehensive book about the techniques and reasons behind buddhist meditation. Technical details about advanced meditation and the relation that meditation has to other aspects of Buddhism may be advanced for early practicioners, but there is plenty of good advice for beginners as well. I would imagine that this book is ideal for Buddhists of any type that are looking for specific instructions on how to meditate.

This book is an eminently well-presented resource containing information on most, if not all, the races in China. Packed with verified statistics (references given), this is not simply a dry and boring text - there is at least one full colour photograph of each racial group along with a full page writeup of their culture, beliefs, location, language and ethnic history.
At the front is an overview of China, Chinese (both the people and the language) and a background of the contents and methods used to collect it.

This book is fascinating to me, a long-term student of Chinese, and a Christian in a Chinese Church. For days I flipped through it reading more and more interesting material - I couldn't put it down!

One aspect jumped out at me, and that is the small graph on each page describing the proportion of people who had not heard the Gospel, the proportion who don't (yet) believe after hearing the Gospel, and the proportion of practicing Christians. What jumped out was the graph for the Lisu people. Whereas most graphs showed 80 to 90% had not heard the Gospel, and only 4 or 5% were practicing Chrisitans, the Lisu were different with over 40% being practicing Christians. Why? Whilst it is hinted at in the text, I'm convinced that this is mostly the result of one man giving up over 20 years of his life to work as missionary in Lisuland: James O Fraser. He laboured year in, year out, taking more than 5 years before seeing his first convert, until finally the Holy Spirit swept through those villages like a storm. So strong were the conversions that the Lisu, perhaps alone of all Chinese races, survived the Cultural Revolution with their church intact.

This shows the difference that one soul can make to this world. Maybe this could be *you* in future?

Have you ever wondered why some races get so big while others are so small?

Have you ever wondered why modern ethnic divisions so closely follow the boundaries of nation-states?

Hattaway doesnt attempt to answer these questions directly. But this book is a cornucopia of the relevant raw data, as concerns the vast area we now know as China.

Centuries of absorptive imperial policy have erased millenia of fascinating political, cultural, and genetic history in China's core regions. In most parts of China, practically everyone is raised to think of themselves as simply part of the "Chinese" ethnic, cultural, and political monolith.

Modern continuations of those imperial policies regrettably ban almost all politically non-motivated research, meaning very little accurate information is available. But at the edges of the empire, where the digestive processes have only had a few centuries to work, there is still a lot of colorful variety to be observed. And thankfully, there are still-independent neighboring nations from which to document those observations.

From a vantage point in nearby Thailand, where many of the same ethno-genetic blocs are represented, Hattaway has been able to glean enough information to weave together a remarkably extensive picture of the ethnic situation within China, primarily its South and Southwest.

The resulting tapestry is a valuable collection of information for anyone, whether their interest is in global evangelism like the author, or in more secular perspectives: Human anthropology, Southeast Asian history, minority affairs come to mind--anything that involves the relationships between genetics, geography, politics, and culture.

The real world is much more complicated than the two questions I started out with would imply. Ethnicity and geography are of course much richer things than simplistic abstractions like race and nation allow for.

I heartily commend Hattaway's effort to document that particular part of this world.

If you have used Operation World to pray for peoples in the world, and you have a heart for the Chinese people -- you got to have Operation China! I am a Chinese from Taiwan, and honestly, I didn't know there are almost 500 people groups in China! This book introduces every people groups in China briefly. It talks about their location, identity, language, customs, religion, and Christianity influence and effort on each group. Best of all, I especially love the photo of each people group. Honestly, when I was just flipping through the pages and looking at those people's faces -- the book touches me so much and I was weeping... because I know that God had created them all and He loves them so much. But not many of them know who He is or even His existence. I was so humbled by God because of His greatness -- I'm a Chinese from Taiwan, but I'm only a small part of the 500 people groups who lives in China! This book helps me to understand the urgency of reaching those people groups and again shows me the heart of God -- as illustrated in Luke 15, that He would go for the 1 lost sheep and leave the 99 behind. God loves those minority in China as well... no matter how small a group they might be, they're still the 1 lost sheep to Him and He will go search for them until they are found. Praise God for the efforts that different people had put into this book!

I must begin by saying I am eternally grateful to Mr. Paul Hattaway. Operation China has been the best resource book on China's minorities that I have read. I bought it a couple of years ago and have not stopped reading it yet. Whenever I am feeling down or discouraged, I pick up my copy of Operation China and get encouraged and inspired once again. I must give God many thanks for Paul. We need more individuals with such committed hearts and a desire to see the Will of God accomplished in their lives like him.

This book by James Tin Yau So is a must to understanding Acupuncture and is also is good for finding points used in the art of Tuina, I am looking to buy this book and would like info on where I can purchase it.

Dr. Tin Yau So is often called the "Father of American Acupuncture." He was the founder of the New England School of Acupuncture, the oldest school of Chinese medicine in the U.S., and was one of my grand-teachers.

This book is a very detailed description of the location of acupuncture points. It details not only how to find each point but also how to needle the points and what reaction to expect (a feature unique to this text). Dr. So also gives lengthy effects for each point.

As Dr. So was trained in China prior to the communists' invention of "TCM" style acupuncture, many of his point location are not standard compared with current Chinese texts. Thus, his locations and uses of points are often provocative, questioning the material that many TCM practitioners learned and use. That said, this book is good for both beginner and advanced practitioners as it contains information no longer "politically correct" by communist Chinese standards.

A must have for all professional practitioners of Chinese medicine!

Dr. James Tin Yau So's first book of acupuncture points. This book is great for the beginning student or novice of acupuncture. It provides a extensive index of points and how to's to find them. Written in an easy to read format. A must for the health care worker's shelf

Dr. So's books on acupuncture points and treatment of disease with acupuncture are excellent, clear, easy to ready,easy to understand and follow. I use them more than any other text in my library (and I have MANY).

Brilliant in every way, David Kidd's carefully weaved tale of the end of Old China, as seen through the eyes of an upper class family, is profoundly personal and endearing. As it wavers between fact and fiction its underlining message becomes abundantly clear: the Old China is gone and never to be forgotten, even as those who lived it fall into the abyss of time. A moving,humorous, delightful, and sorrowful read. Simply brilliant.

This book haunts..it stays with you as a most intimate portrait of those special and tender people caught in the transition between the old China and the Revolution in 1948. No account has ever brought more tears and love for those real people who saw and felt their world change almost beyond their understanding.

Beautifully, lyrically rendered in the author's inimitable voice, full of haunting descriptions of a world that is gone forever yet never to be forgotten. David Kidd was truly one of a kind, unique in every way.

Memoirs of the surviving privileged classes who lost everything in twentieth-century revolutions can often seem terribly materialistic and self-pitying: when displaced aristocrats wail and wail for their lost tiaras or smashed porcelain, without a jot of sympathy for why they were asked to leave in the first place, you can begin perversely to develop sympathy for the cadres who called these people class parasites and threw them out. David Kidd's memoir of marrying into an ancient and wealthy Chinese family in 1948 shows every sign of such a work, but it's far better than it starts out to be (given his adoration for lives of privilege and his almost willfuil refusal to see the point of view of why anyone would support the Communists in 1949 in the first place). The superb descriptions of the Yu family's rotting but beautiful manor are done with great humor and artistry as well as with melancholy, and the very memorable portrait of the phlegmatic and wry Yus themselves seems to bring additional perspective and depth to the material. What emerges in the end is (despite the book's brevity) a very artful and moving snapshot of a world in transition

Western policy-makers and consumers alike are largely unaware of the enormous economic and geopolitical consequences of China's rapidly expanding energy imports. Until the mid-1990s China was a net exporter of hydrocarbons, but by 2010 it is projected to be one of the largest importers of petroleum. The world's most populous nation will enter the ranks of those countries, mainly advanced industrial societies, that are dependent on overseas oil supplies, particularly from the Middle East. What is China doing to secure low-cost, stable supplies of oil for its future energy needs? Will it continue to forge bilateral energy supply agreements or will it enter into international arrangements that guarantee access to oil and fuel stockpiles in times of political crisis and market uncertainty?

In Petro-Dragon's Rise, researcher Xiaojie Xu explains the perceptions,strategies and plans of Chinese government agencies and the three enormous, semi-privatized Chinese oil and gas enterprises. With the insights of a comparative scholar of economics and geopolitics, and from the unique experience of a corporate researcher -- he advised PetroChina on its overseas capitalization plan -- Xu comprehensively explores the rapidly evolving legal, regulatory and policy framework of energy policy and energy security policy formation in China, with an emphasis on the "go
abroad" strategy that has sent Chinese oil engineers to Sudan, Kazakhstan,Venezuela and even Canada in recent years. Petro-Dragon's Rise is essential reading for those trying to understand Chinese perspectives on how China will meet its growing demand for energy.

Steven W. Lewis, Ph.D.
Senior Researcher in Asian Politics and Economics, Baker Institute for Public Policy
Rice University, USA

Another Review by Steven W. Lewis
Western policy-makers and consumers alike are largely unaware of the enormous economic and geopolitical consequences of China's rapidly expanding energy imports. Until the mid-1990s China was a net exporter of hydrocarbons, but by 2010 it is projected to be one of the largest importers of petroleum. The world's most populous nation will enter the ranks of those countries, mainly advanced industrial societies, that are dependent on overseas oil supplies, particularly from the Middle East. What is China doing to secure low-cost, stable supplies of oil for its future energy needs? Will it continue to forge bilateral energy supply agreements or will it enter into international arrangements that guarantee access to oil and fuel stockpiles in times of political crisis and market uncertainty?

In Petro-Dragon's Rise, researcher Xiaojie Xu explains the perceptions,strategies and plans of Chinese government agencies and the three enormous, semi-privatized Chinese oil and gas enterprises. With the insights of a comparative scholar of economics and geopolitics, and from the unique experience of a corporate researcher -- he advised PetroChina on its overseas capitalization plan -- Xu comprehensively explores the rapidly evolving legal, regulatory and policy framework of energy policy and energy security policy formation in China, with an emphasis on the "go
abroad" strategy that has sent Chinese oil engineers to Sudan, Kazakhstan,Venezuela and even Canada in recent years. Petro-Dragon's Rise is essential reading for those trying to understand Chinese perspectives on how China will meet its growing demand for energy.

Steven W. Lewis, Ph.D.
Senior Researcher in Asian Politics and Economics, Baker Institute for Public Policy
Rice University, USA

Western policy-makers and consumers alike are largely unaware of the enormous economic and geopolitical consequences of China's rapidly expanding energy imports. Until the mid-1990s China was a net exporter of hydrocarbons, but by 2010 it is projected to be one of the largest importers of petroleum. The world's most populous nation will enter the ranks of those countries, mainly advanced industrial societies, that are dependent on overseas oil supplies, particularly from the Middle East. What is China doing to secure low-cost, stable supplies of oil for its future energy needs? Will it continue to forge bilateral energy supply agreements or will it enter into international arrangements that guarantee access to oil and fuel stockpiles in times of political crisis and market uncertainty?

In Petro-Dragon's Rise, researcher Xiaojie Xu explains the perceptions,strategies and plans of Chinese government agencies and the three enormous, semi-privatized Chinese oil and gas enterprises. With the insights of a comparative scholar of economics and geopolitics, and from the unique experience of a corporate researcher -- he advised PetroChina on its overseas capitalization plan -- Xu comprehensively explores the rapidly evolving legal, regulatory and policy framework of energy policy and energy security policy formation in China, with an emphasis on the "go
abroad" strategy that has sent Chinese oil engineers to Sudan, Kazakhstan,Venezuela and even Canada in recent years. Petro-Dragon's Rise is essential reading for those trying to understand Chinese perspectives on how China will meet its growing demand for energy.

Reviewed by Dr. Steven W. Lewis, Senior Researcher in Asian Politics and Economics, Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University, USA.

The impact of a steadily growing Chinese economy on the global oil and gas markets has been a subject for continuous debate by think-tank specialists and academics alike for the past decade. Xiaojie Xu¡¯s Petro-Dragon¡¯s Rise is the first book-length contribution by a Chinese oil industry analyst to offer a comprehensive assessment in the English language.

Xu has been analyzing global oil and gas market trends for the China National Petroleum Corporation since 1983. This work experience has meant his extensive exposure to international energy organizations, multinational energy corporations, and think-tank as well as academic research centers worldwide. His views therefore represent those by one of the most internationally oriented Chinese energy industry analysts.

The book is organized into nine chapters. The first chapter offers an assessment of the mega-trends, at the turn of the century, in global energy supply and demand, together with strategic positioning by the United States and other major powers, international oil companies and host governments. Xu¡¯s emphasis is on improving the channels of transportation to oil importing countries in Asia.

In the second chapter, Xu presents his summary and review of Chinese assessments of China in the global energy market, while updating the readers on major policy changes since 1998 to address the ¡°explicit imbalance¡± (p. 47) in the Chinese oil industry today. According to Xu, a key strategy adopted is to give priority to gas. This is the focus of Chapter Three. From this chapter we learn Chinese energy policymaker¡¯s pragmatism in tapping into both domestic and offshore gas supplies. Structural reforms of the Chinese oil industry make up the focus of Chapter Four. It should be noted, however, reforming the bureaucratic structures is much easier than dealing with the market complexities associated with the overall change in the Chinese economy.

Xu then takes us through a contour of his assessment of Central Asia (Chapter Five), the Middle East (Chapter Six), and Russian (Chapter Seven) as sources of oil and gas import for China. While space does not allow the reviewer to go over each in detail, Xu¡¯s presentation, in contrast with studies on the same subjects by Western writers, presents a picture of mixed opportunities and constraints each of these areas holds for China.

Chapters Eight and Nine elaborate on ongoing mechanisms and future prospects of China¡¯s cooperation with countries in Northeast Asia and the major powers, respectively. In these chapters, Xu outlines how China is utilizing every opportunity possible to diversify its dependence on offshore oil and gas. In these chapters we learn that although China¡¯s Northeast Asian neighbors are likewise dependent on oil and gas supplies from other regions of the world, China sees it conducive to pursue overall economic ties as an effective means for reducing the possible shocks to China¡¯s energy needs.

The book does not have a conclusion chapter. On the other hand, this is perhaps reflective of the state of affairs in China¡¯s domestic and international energy markets. There can be no easy way to offer a sweeping summary.

Overall, Petro-Dragon¡¯s Rise serves as a meaningful overview of China¡¯s energy ties with the rest of the world. The book is well documented and thoroughly analyzed. Interested readers, both in the industry and academia, can gain an informative look inside the world of thinking about China¡¯s energy industry and its global ties. The book should be required reading for courses dealing with China as a player in the global energy markets.

I never had an interest to go to China. It just seemed like some distant fantasy. But when I was required to pick a book from my high school book report, I picked Postcards From China. I must admit that I partly picked it because it was written by my Aunt, but it was no mistake. This book journies through the lives of a family trying to survive in a country where the language is foreign and the culture is out of the box. As I finished the book I realized how badly I want to go to China. I want to experience being in a different culture, and being with different people. More than that, I want to go to China show the love of Jesus to the people who are suffering there. The pain of the people that is expressed through this book opened my eyes to see how lost this world is. This is an amazing book, and it is worth your time to read it. I am a sophomore who is not a big fan of reading, but I am telling you, it is amazing.

The Postcards came from Xiamen, China's incomparable "garden city". I received Sandy's Postcards one by one, as they were written, and I was one of the people who urged her to publish them in book form so that others could also enjoy Megan, Larry, Sandy, and Xiamen. Sandy's writing is just like her voice---she is a great communicator. I was worried that her editor might tamper with her writing, thereby obscuring her inimitable style, but thankfully, this did not happen. The editor had the good sense to leave her excellent writing intact.
The story is a charming and compelling one, but is Xiamen and its people really like Sandy has described, or is this fiction masquerading as non-fiction? Well, I was so enchanted with what I was hearing about Xiamen that I went and visited the Slavins twice, for a total of ten weeks. The Xiamen you will read about is truly the Xiamen I experienced first hand.
Do something nice for yourself---read this book!

The most impressive part of the story was when the Slavins moved to China so their adopted daughter can reconnect with her country of birth. Their open hearts and eyes made the book a joy to read. I liked its down-to-earth view of life in China that any American can understand. Even though China is westernizing at a dizzying pace, their daily adjustments to life in China reminded me of the many conveniences we take for granted in the U.S. Their spirit of adventure was inspiring. A fun read!

Sandra Slavin relates their family's China experience with an astute eye. She paints pictures with charm, wit and a insight and portrays a culture that eventually impacted their lives in unforeseen ways.

I am like The Rice Sprout Song.Eileen chang is the greatest writer of China.

Another one of Eileen Chang's translations of her Chinese works, this is an excellent novel about China's farmers and the struggles they encounter as a result of Maoism in China. This is my second favorite novel of hers, behind Naked Earth. Unlike the latter, The Rice-Sprout Song is much easier to find, and now includes an excellent introduction by David Wang.

The Old Master who collected Chinese wisdom in Tao Te Ching some 2,500 years ago wrote pithily:
"The sage never has a mind of his own;
He considers the minds of the common people to be his mind."

Today, he would not change a word for the sage: the sheng-jen in Beijing. True, modern China, a colossus of 1.2 billion people, is fronted by Shanghai and other booming, skyscrapered, fiber-opticked, globally connected metropolises. But beyond the urban fronts, reality is 900 million peasants--75% of the total population--living a rural, feudal life with Marxist trappings. What gives the Beijing mandarin insomnia is not rhetorical exchanges with America like we saw earlier in 2001. No, it's much more the primal fear bad weather and bad crops might visit hunger upon the 900 million--if the peasants go hungry, the government goes down and chaos surely follows. Chaos, for the Chinese mind, being anathema (off the Tao, hindering wu-wei).

The Rice-Sprout Song by Eileen Chang (1920-95), first published in 1955, deftly evokes rural Chinese life in the early days of the Maoist Revolution. Though well known to Chinese readers everywhere, Chang's work has only recently been in print again for English readers. In 1998, three years after her death, the University of California reissued this novel and a companion work, The Rouge of the North.

Chang, a giant in Chinese literature, wrote and lived a self-proclaimed aesthetic of desolation, especially after immigrating to the United States in the mid-Fifties. A Garbo-esque recluse, Chang was found dead in a barren Hollywood, California, studio apartment. Her will asked that her body be "cremated instantly, the ashes scattered in any desolate spot, over a fairly wide area, if on land." If Chang, as she said, was haunted by thoughts of desolation, then The Rice-Sprout Song shows a corollary to her artistic hunger: Her writing transcends any simple, obvious political interpretation of her material. Neither pro-Mao nor anti-Mao, but a literary meditation on peasant lives caught up in the ironies of political will and human need when hunger stalks the countryside.

The Rice-Sprout Song gets underway with a common family event: a wedding. Gold Flower of T'an Village will marry Plenty Own Chou of neighboring Chou Village. This might not be a joyous occasion for Chang begins to summon the isolation and loneliness of village life: "Sunlight lay across the street like an old yellow dog, barring the way. The sun had grown old here." Yes, even that universal restorer of the spirit--the sun--can be menacing. That all is not right when the festive wedding occasion arrives is shown by note of the "inferior food" that of necessity is served. Big Uncle complains that he cannot see the rice in his bowl of watery gruel. This jho mush--anything but solid rice--becomes one thematic particular for hunger that haunts this novel.

If Chang were less an artist, the reader's easy-to-hate nemesis would be Comrade Wong, the kan pu of T'an Village, the local representative of the Party. For it is Comrade Wong's unenviable task to carry out a political action showing support for the People's Liberation Army in their fight on the Korean front: a gift the peasants cannot afford: half a pig and forty catties of rice cakes from each family. But before this leads to the tragic end to The Rice-Sprout Song, we follow, in flashback, Wong as he finds the love of his life, Shah Ming. He loses her in the vagaries of fighting for the PLA. When at last he sees her again, she waves from a window in the facade of a collapsed building on the battlefield. Inside the building, Wong sees only rubble and overhead, at the window, nothing. He knows his hallucination proved Shah Ming was saying good-bye from beyond. For Comrade Wong, fate gave him nothing but the Party.

We also see dramatic irony when Comrade Ku, the city intellectual, comes to live in T'an Village, to learn the ways of the peasants. His goal of a movie script about village life suffers from writer's block; he habitually sneaks off to another town to buy food to eat on the sly. And when Big Aunt, who spouts Communist rhetoric that is appallingly upbeat, breaks down in a fit of anger. She says they are all empty-bellied and she doesn't care if she is reported. And when Moon Scent, the wife of Gold Root, returns from working three years as a maid in Shanghai. A force to be reckoned with, Moon Scent, in an act of righteous anger, gives this tragedy its capstone.

Essential reading that shares the texture, the heritage, and the yearnings of nearly a billion of our fellow earthlings, search out this reissue of The Rice-Sprout Song. As one t'ai chi ch'uan teacher said, "Perfect doesn't exist. Near-perfect does." The Rice-Sprout Song is a "near-perfect" evocation of the common people in the timeless Middle Kingdom.

Rice Sprout Song is possibly the best work of literature I have ever read. It was first recommended to me as descriptive of the collectivization era shortly after the 1949 Revolution in China, a classic tale between the state and the individual. It is a spellbinding, troubling work, and is almost impossible to believe that it was Eileen Chang's first work in English. The language she uses is sparse, beautiful and conveys greatest impact after the last page is read, and the cover closed. It is more than an interesting story about conflict between the state and the individual. It is an unsettling story of physical starvation and the death of hope and love.

Shanghi Quartet found me in the footsteps of Min Zhan Lu. I found the book riveting - couldn't lay it down. I wanted to lift
the characters out of the book and spend some time with them over tea. This book is destined as a best seller.

This is simply a beautiful book. I read it on a long flight to Australia and kept turning to my travel companion to say, "I love this book. You have to read this book."

When I got to my conference, I gave the book to the first person I met who was also writing about the people of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I wanted to share it with everyone.

So, now I'm on-line to get a new copy. I don't want to be without it.

Shanghai Quartet is a wonderful book that gives a honest portrayl of life in China over the last century. Unlike other books of its kind, it gives voice to three generations of Chinese women and their struggles through the various political regimes.

This memoir also gives voice to a generation of Chinese immigrants who immigrated to the US in the early 80's. This generations has thus far been very silent and this book provides an accurate account of their experience.

In addition, Shanghai Quartet tells of a Catholic and aristocratic family in Shanghai that we rarely see in other books. I highly recommend this complex book -- it was a true joy to read!

I meant to save this book for an upcoming long air flight, but after the first two pages, I couldn't put it down. Min-Zhan Lu's compelling stories of her life and that of her grandmother, nanny, and mother are much like her scholarship in composition studies: rigorous, sensitive, thought-provoking. She depicts herself and the other women in her family as devoted to crossings, travel, immigration, and shows what strengths and challenges arise out of such lives. As she tells and revises and retells these stories, she looks for hints and strategies for doing better to recognize those strengths and handle those challenges. Her quest to compose possible lives, for herself and her daughter, rendered in exquisite prose, inspires us to see our lives as writing projects, always open to rethinking and revision.

It's like reading Proust's Rememberance of Times Past, but not so long. Each detail is mined for its resonances, memories, connections, meaning in the past and in the future. What's the meaning of her parents' clasped hands? What does it mean to drink green tea? Why do people we barely knew sometimes come to mean so much to us? So much meaning in the small details of everyday life.

It's a great book for a book group to read - if you're like me, you will be dying to talk about it with friends as soon as you finish it. It's the best thing I've read this year, and I read a lot.

Prior to this book, I didn't know much about the Jews who fled to China during WWII. This was an interesting and eye opening book. The story line follows a young girl and her family as they flee Austria and move to Shanghai, China. When the Japanese take over Shanghai, Jews are forced to live in an isolated part of the city guarded by soldiers. The living conditions are horrid. Many die. I highly recommend this book to anyone, young and old, studying the Holocaust.

Sometimes fiction is truer than memoir. In reading a memoir, the reader is outside the story, looking in; but in good fiction, the reader enters the story and experiences it almost as if there. With her newest book: Shanghai Shadows, Lois Ruby conjures up the magic of "being there." The setting of the book may be Shanghai, but the real story is human nature.
Ilse, her older brother Erich, and their mother and father have come to the awful realization that Austria is no place for a Jewish family. It is time to get out, but to where? There is only one possible place, Japanese occupied China--or Shanghai. At first, conditions are tolerable. As the political situation deteriorates and the United States enters the war, the immigrant population is imprisoned in a ghetto where the inhabitants have to deal with near starvation and an odious, cruel, but eccentric keeper of the gate. But it is the relationship that develops between Ilse and the little Chinese street-boy, Liu that make this refuge story so outstanding. Filled with daring resistance activities in which she and her brother participate, and inhabited by wonderfully drawn characters like Ilse's parents-- once proud and proper upper class Viennese Jews who evolve realistically as their fortunes change--this book is highly recommended.
Ages 11-14.
Reviewed by Rachel Kamin

Shanghai Shadows is another great read from Lois Ruby. The plot and setting are novel as well as well-researched. The main character Ilse is complex--at times not too admirable but always honest.

Recommended for mature readers--too old for most young children.

For suspense and surprises, twists and turns, no one invents plots like Lois Ruby. Shanghai Shadows covers six years in the life of Ilse Shpann, her brother, Erich, and their parents - six years as "stateless refugees" in Shanghai, to which they have fled from Nazi-occuped Vienna. Amidst intensely realistic evocations of the sights, sounds, smells, and diverse population of the city, Ilse matures from a willful child to a courageous, self-sacrificing (but still willful) young woman. Her acerbic sense of humor and love of adventure sustain her as conditions of life for Jews and everyone else go from bad to worse. Ilse and Erich both work for a resistance group; their father, an unemployed violinist, grows apathetic; their proper mother is the iron will that keeps together and alive until a secret from Mrs. Shpann's past shatters the family. So eventful a plot is held together by sparkling dialogue and superb characterization, with major and minor characters all interacting believably as well as coherently. The grimness of the Shpann's six years in Shanghai never overwhelms the story because it is mitigated by flashes of humor, humanity, and Ilse's indomitable spirit. Ruby is the author of Swindletop and The Moxie Kid among other books. The talent that was glimpsed in those reaches fulfillment here, in a historical novel that should not be missed! Highly recommended for grades 6 - 9.
Reviewed by Linda R. Silver
Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter, Sept./Oct. 2007