2 comments about China (Postcards from).

1. My husband and I visited China in August, 2004 so I ordered this book for my preschool class. To my dismay, on pgs. 10 and 24 the pictures of the Temple of Heaven were labeled as being the Forbidden City!
   
   Pat Van hoose



2. This book has a very unique way of telling it's readers about China through photos that are suppose to be postcards. Each page / Postcard message starts out Dear..... and then goes on to talk about China, then ends with a PS note. The postcards talk about bikes in Beijing, Chinese Food, Forbidden City, Traveling in China, Great Wall, Tierra Cotta Warriors, Longest River in China, Biggest City, Guilin, Staying Fit, Chinese New Year, Chinese Flag and has a map of China. The book also has a glossary.
   
   As far as the 2 photos that the other reviewer wrote about are two different buildings that look simular but I do not think that the photo at the Forbidden City is the Temple of Heaven. There is a typo in the PS: of the Forbidden City that should have been on the Temple of Heaven. If you look at the 2 photos the Temple of Heaven as 2 build roofs where the other photo only has 1 and is much smaller.
   
   I think this would be a good intro book for children, The photos are small, but this is a good base or place to start.

5 comments about The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World.

1. This is a very funny book, and you can just pick it up and read a little bit here, and there, or open it at random and find something funny, but the problem is the font is too small. The book is not very long, so they could have used a larger type face.



2. This woman surely must have been mad to have written some of these things. I can only say that it has to be read to be believed. It's completely hilarious.



3. I quite enjoyed this little Victorian traveloge. I picked it up expecting it to be more humorous, and although I found the writer's style quite dour and pedantic, I became more interested in understanding her perspective than laughing at her views. I imagine that there were many folks in her day who felt exactly the same as she did about any country that was not England. The editor makes a pretty terrific comment in the preface to this edition, however, in that the stereotypes that this book espoused back in the days of Queen Victoria or not all that different from the unfortunate and xenophobic views that so many people in today's world ...there is definitely a lesson to be learned here.



4. Now that we live in the 21st century, 150 years since Favell Mortimer (nee Bevan) wrote her descriptions of the rest of the world, I guess it is safe to give this book five stars. On the other hand, if I thought that the contents of the book were going to be taken as, um, gospel by the readers, I would give it only one star. The five stars are basically for Todd Pruzan, not for Favell Mortimer.
   
   Just who are the clumsiest people in Europe? According to Mortimer, the Portuguese! Didn't you all know that? I sure didn't. And what's the most beautiful city in the world? Well, it's Edinburgh. That green hill with the castle on top surely gives it an advantage over, say, Copenhagen!
   
   And what is the wickedest city in the world? It certainly gives a different meaning to the line "I left my heart in San Francisco."
   
   Which people are the drunkest? Oh, never mind.
   
   You can find out so much about all sorts of, um, strange and faraway people. Such as Icelanders, Greenlanders, Sicilians, Ostyaks, Tartars, Affghans (I'm using Ms. Mortimer's spellings here), and so on.
   
   Yes, it is an amazing book. Still, it has its share of facts to go along with the nonsense, all stated by Ms. Mortimer with an air of supreme confidence in spite of her actual failure to have visited any but a couple of the places she describes. In addition, it has a constant viciousness that leaves an unpleasant aftertaste, especially when one takes into account the fact that this material was originally designed to be consumed by young schoolchildren. I think we would all do well to realize that it really is wrong to come up with such works and feed them to impressionable children.
   
   When I lived in England, over fifty years ago, I did have a look at a number of books about the rest of the world, including some children's books. Some of the books had been written as recently as 1950, but others were from several decades earlier, and the things they said about the United States were often pretty funny. I can see how this book fits in with some of what I saw in England back then, and I can also see how it can help give misleading impressions about foreign nations to plenty of youngsters. Even though we do grow up and learn more accurate information about places, some of the overall attitudes we may have about other nations can be greatly distorted by the things we're told when we're very young.
   
   Should we be careful not to produce works of our own that have the same sorts of problems as those which Ms. Mortimer wrote? Absolutely. And I hope that in the year 2150, the works of, say, Ed Said will be read with the same roars of laughter that now accompany the readings of Ms. Mortimer's contributions.



5. Todd Pruzan's introduction and commentary on Mrs. Mortimer's weird take on the peoples of the world left me wanting more -- although sixty pages on Madagascar might have been too much to swallow. I particularly liked his summary of each nation's or region's state of culture and accomplishments before letting Mrs. M have her say.

No comments about Laos and Cambodia in Pictures.

No comments about Hedonist's Guide To Istanbul 1st Edition (Hedonist's Guide to..., A).

2 comments about Turkestan Reunion (Kodansha Globe).

1. Turkestan Reunion is a collection of the letters written by Eleanor Lattimore to her family in the United States documenting her honeymoon travels from Beijing, through Siberia, into East Turkestan, and over the Karakorum mountains into British Kashmir.
   
   The route Lattimore takes is epic and ranging, crossing everything from arid deserts, Siberian tundra, and towering mountains. Such a journey would make fascinating reading regardless, yet an even greater part of the intrigue and charm of this book comes from its authorship by a woman in time when even hardy, professional male adventurers sometimes couldn't endure similar conditions. Ms. Lattimore is truly a trailblazer, in the literal sense of trekking across routes tread by the feet of very few, but also in the sense that her adventures in the early part of the 20th century very clearly run contrary to what where then very strong and revered concepts of female domesticity. In 1927, the idea of a traveling, white woman was so foreign and novel that many officials and friends who hosted the Lattimores, European or otherwise, were sometimes at a loss in deciding what kind of arrangements should be made for Eleanor. Not only does Lattimore shatter "womanly domesticity" just by traveling, she also consciously chooses to travel in the most down-to-earth way, reaching for the most authentic experiences. Often she chooses horseback over carriage (when physically possible; the weather in Turkestan often did no permit), she voices preference for the rundown accommodations and authentic food of the locals rather than the plusher European lodging and food that sometimes was available.
   
   Beyond the gender angle, Turkestan Reunion additionally presents a sort of ethnographic experience much less condescending to locals than many travel writings and exploration writings of the time. Lattimore's writing inevitably retains an element of colonial privilege, for example, in the repeated tendency to bestow comical Western names on their guides rather than learning their real names. However, relative to other writers of the time, and to other Westerners in general of the 1920s, the Lattimores display a unique willingness and even desire to commune with locals and acknowledge the hardships of their existence. Eleanor Lattimore with a keen eye documents everyday proceedings of everyday villagers; games among herdsmen, a witch-curing ceremony, marriage and divorce, the arbitration of disputes, these and others are documented in Lattimores casual yet elegant prose. As white travelers in a China still mired in a pseudo-colonized position relative to the rest, there still are many instances where the Lattimores are regaled by obsequious officials and conniving businessmen with banquets and galas, but while these celebrations often compose the bulk of 19th and early 20th century travel writing, Lattimore's book is balanced by the ground-up perspective she is willing to describe. As such, there is a pre-ethnographic element to Lattimore's writing that anticipates the academic enlightenment which led to the understanding that the lives of locals are worth documenting and should be observed from more than just a colonial-overlord perspective.
   
   What drew me to this book was the simple premise of it all; even in our intrepid modern times, young and energetic newly weds are more likely to choose Cabo San Lucas or Paris to celebrate their honeymoon, yet Owen and Eleanor Lattimore chose the foreboding deserts and towering, ice-capped peaks of East Turkestan to celebrate their marriage, and at a time when traveling through such extreme environments was not as easy as buying a bus ticket or boarding an airplane. However, Eleanor Lattimore's simple and descriptive writing style exceeds the novelty of this underlying premise, anticipating a sort of feminist traveling philosophy and capturing an ethnographic ethic to observe, and therefore understand the peoples of the places they visited.



2. Turkestan Reunion is a compendium of letters written by Eleanor Holgate Lattimore to her family while traveling on her over one year honeymoon trip in Siberia, Turkestan and the Karakorum. These letters are arranged according to their date having been written at approximately fifteen day intervals. Each letter is forewarded by a brief resume of the happenings and is heralded by a nice drawing, which I believe is by the Author. It could be called an epistolary travel book and this is not common among travel literature. This very characteristic lends the book its grace and appeal, that emerge strikingly after all these years (it was assembled in 1934 from the journey which took place in 1927-28).
   Why a companion book? Eleanor Lattimore was Owen Lattimore's wife and her husband is famous among students of politics and of the Eastern civilizations for his many contributions to the knowledge of those little known countries in those times. Owen wrote his own books on their original wedding trip, the Desert Road to Turkestan and High Tartary, that are famous in their own right, and probably Eleanor's book is often picked up because its mentioned in these other works.
   However even if it describes events that are already known, Eleanor's outlook on these same occasions is completely different and orginal. A woman's sensibility? Probably, a woman that possesed courage, curiosity, wasn't afraid of disconforts and was able to relate herself with empathy towards her travel companions and the people she met.
   The endurance of the great disconfort of the couple's trip assumes in the Author's prose almost a sense of liberation from the material preoccupations of the civilized world to go back to the essentials of living: protection from cold and heat, food, rest, traveling necessities such as carts and horses, good company.
   The first part of the book contains the description of the seventeen day travel through Siberia, that Eleanor accomplished alone, while the rest narrates the common path through Chinese Turkestan and the five Karakorum Passes. Much attentions is dedicated to the nomads encountered during the journey, the Qazaks the Qirghiz and others.
   The book can truely be defined ethnographic because it is first hand description of a traveling experience accomplished with curiosity and the desire to learn. "One can understand a little of how difficult a province is to rule when one relizes that it still contains flotsam and jetsam remnants of every variety of people who have passed through or conquered the land as well as the scamps and villains who have run away from Chinese law", is an example of the deeply empathic outlook on her experiences.
   Another aspect I particularly love in travel books is the "spirit of place", the ability to make the reader feel inside a different reality. Eleanor Lattimore's Turkestan Reunion truely evokes this feeling, more than Owen Lattimore's High Tartary which is more scholarly and detailed.
   As David Lattimore, the couple's son, affirms in the Biographical Note at the end of the book Eleanor and Owen's journey and love story deserve to be remembered because of their uniqueness and the sense of adventure and youth they are still capable of conveying.

4 comments about China Obscura.

1. First, full disclosure: I have known Mark Leong for 10 years and worked with him as a colleague in China. So this may account for my bias, but I believe that his photos of modern-day China are among the best taken during the post-Tiananmen era. During my decade as a correspondent in China, I always wanted to work with Mark because I thought his gritty, in-your-face pictures captured a side of China that often was overlooked. Instead of showing us the by-now stock shots of high-rises and neon lights, he took viewers to the street level, his 28mm lens always getting reeeeaallly close up into people's faces. I loved it and this book brings back in superb detail the China that I knew in the late 20th and early 21st century. I strongly recommend it for anyone interested in China--it's a beautiful, affordable addition to anyone's library.



2. Leong's beautiful, yet haunting photographs show us a side of China not covered by the media's focus on China's economic growth story. The compositions are arresting and the content intriguing.



3. Overall this book is a bit pompous and superficial. Drugs on a Chinese money, and boring portraits of old relatives, hackneyed scenes of bicycles with stickers on them.... I hope Mr. Leong's future books are edited a bit more carefully. This current one looks like he went into his closet, took out all his prints, and threw them at his publisher.



4. Mark's work embodies the raw feeling and sense I've always felt in China. His work is journalistic in it's explorations and perspective, and serves as a great document and window for everyone to see a slice of post-Tianamen (1989 - 2003) China. An easy add to anyone's library of books on China.

5 comments about Eating Soup With Chopsticks: Sweet Sixteen in Japan.

1. Through her new book, Ruth Pennington Paget takes us on a summer-long journey into a new culture (Japan) through the eyes of an adventurous and curious teenager. Twenty years after her exchange to Japan, the author recounts her time abroad and her vivid memories of the many experiences she encountered. The book is not a travel book as much as a book about dealing with differences, communication and human connection.

   It teaches us that at the heart of understanding a different culture, we learn most about our own self and come to understand better our own values.

   This book is a fun read!




2. At the age of sixteen, Ruth Paget traveled to Japan as an exchange student. Although she had traveled internationally before, she had never had such an intense immersion into a foreign culture. And Japan was very very foreign. "Eating Soup with Chopsticks" shows the remarkable poise with which this sixteen-year-old faced what many people would consider a challenge. In her search to understand her host family and culture, she jumped in with both feet. She did so by immediately identifying what she and her hosts had in common, which was a sense of respect that quickly developed into a sense of affection. It shows the growth that can occur when you appreciate and accept differences between people.

   Ms. Paget's account of her summer abroad lovingly recounts scenes of daily life in Japan, and amuses with anecdotes of a Midwestern girl's first encounters with raw fish and wasabi. But the overriding lesson of this book is that wonderful things happen when you take off your blue glasses - and open yourself up to discovery. It should be required reading for every American teenager.




3. If you added what you know now to a diary you wrote 20 years ago without changing the original script, it would read like "Eating Soup With Chopsticks." This charming memoir of a life-defining experience captures the innocence and youthful enthusiasm of an adventurous spirit learning to see the world. The lessons of language, history, and cultural perspective are more important than ever as we evolve toward a global society.



4. Ruth Pennington Paget's "Eating Soup with Chopsticks" is a sentimental and sweet tale about one momentous exchange summer in Japan. Then-teenage Ruth is full of profound observations about life and shows a maturity beyond her years. These memoirs will help you see the world through "green" lenses! Pack your mental bags and head on a trip to Japan!



5. This book is short and sweet. Ruth's writing style has a natural flow and she displays a keen sense of humor that kept me laughing throughout. If you are interested in an authentic account of the exchange student life, a quick and smooth read, or just a good laugh, this book comes highly recommended.

1 comments about Asia's Legendary Hotels: The Romance of Travel.

1. Any art library strong in commercial architecture and design needs ASIA'S LEGENDARY HOTELS, a focus on the histories and presentations of some of Asia's most famous hotels, from Raffles in Singapore to the Ananda in the Himalayas. From the building of the structures to the famous people who occupied the buildings over the decades, ASIA'S LEGENDARY HOTELS also makes a fine coffee table addition for any who enjoy travel, and may even be considered for public libraries strong in travel pieces mixed with visual displays of structures.

No comments about Fodor's Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan, 1st Edition: Expert Advice and Smart Choices: Where to Stay, Eat, and Explore On and Off the Beaten Path (Fodor's Gold Guides).

1 comments about The Lost Dynasty: Uncovering Sri Lanka's Secret Past.

1. First, I am from Sri Lanka. It was kind of shock to see it started with LTTE stuff and took some time to sink in that what the author tried to say. I think it was much nicer if the author started with a different kind of interduction/first chapter to capture the big picture of this book. I had a good understanding about the history of Sri Lanka but this book definitely fill some of the gaps in my knowledge. I gave 4 stars because of the introduction and first chapter but highly recommended.