5 comments about Vignettes of Taiwan.

1. Joshua Samuel Brown is the Mahatma Gandhi of restaurant criticism, the Rudyard Kipling of professional boxing, the Lance Armstrong of economic planning. His voice shines in this magnificent exposition of over a decade of perplexing customs and offensive odors.
   
   Proud and misunderstood like Taiwan itself, Mr. Brown regales us with tales of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, betel nuts, and how to avoid jail time by impersonating a mormon.
   
   This is a book to be read aloud by the fireside while snacking on extremely sour dried fruits and squid jerky.



2. I thought that I had a good understanding of Eastern culture. I was wrong. Where was Mr. Brown when we were making ill-fated decisions like the bombing of Cambodia?
   
   Anyway, this book is so funny that I think that I've soiled myself again.



3. What a thrill, what a depth of knowledge crammed in this tiny book...the understanding the author shows for this land and it's people overwhelms me...and I thought I like Chinese food before I read this book...oh my...who knew???
   
   My only complaint is the scant bulk of this tome...not weighty enough to keep a broken window open...but cheap enough to mail to all the relatives...
   
   Buy this book,
   Joshua's Mother



4. Vignettes of Taiwan makes for good reading. For anyone interested in learning more about Taiwan, Republic of China this isn't a bad place to start. The tone oscillates between academic and comedic and although it is rather small, there is lots to stimulate your intellectual and exploratory curiosity; much like the Chinese island-nation itself.
   
   Troy Parfitt, author



5. I thought that this book would be quite good, given the number of five star reviews it received by other Amazon.com users. Instead, I found it mediocre. The humor displayed by the author is interesting, certainly, but for those who really wish to learn anything deep about Taiwan and its people, this is not the book to look to. However, if you simply wish to read a mildly entertaining book, then this book would be fine.

1 comments about Journey Across Tibet.

1. Wilby tells exciting stories, and I admit that her love of adventure is infectuous, even though her writing style isn't my favorite. However, I lose patience with her almost automatic reverence for Tibetans as it contrasts against her utter disgust for the Chinese, whose culture she repeatedly labels "ugly." At one point she writes that out of two billion Chinese in the world there are only two decent people -- a helpful duo she meets on her journey. This uncontrolled prejudice is contrary to the tolerant spirit most "world travelers" would hope to embody, and I am astonished that such thoughtless sentiments were included in the final, published draft. Yes, it is tempting to rally behind the underdogs in a situation such as Tibet's, but that does not require a sympathizer to heap disdain upon the entire nation of China. Turn the lense -- if compassion were indeed "earned" by membership in some flawless political or cultural entity, westerners abroad certainly have no business relying on others' goodwill to the extent that Wilby relied on that of her Tibetan hosts.

2 comments about Still Clueless In Tokyo: Another Sketchbook Of Weird And Wonderful Things In Japan.

1. Still Clueless in Tokyo continues to delight while sharing knowledge about a wide variety of common things found in Japanese Culture. Keeps you laughing while you learn.



2. Artist Betty Reynolds entertains us while she enlarges our understanding of what is foreign to our own culture. Some may think it is more a preparation for a trivia game but it is written/painted with great delight and should be received the same way. "STILL CLUELESS . . ." is brilliant. Be sure to add it to your book shelves; it works magic on a gloomy day.
   
   The watercolors are as amusing as they are bright. Reynolds, an acclaimed family flag-designer, takes the reader 'every-which-way' - - what may at first seem strange is shown to make sense: foods (gingko nuts are grilled - and delicious); holidays - including religious observances; seasons; advertising & vending machines; and a double-page spread about "the talented & terrifying toilets" mentioned by others . . .
   
   The New Year celebrations seem more interesting than ours in the U.S., or perhaps they are more age-friendly? And what country could match "Harikayo," a ceremony for retiring broken or crooked needles by burying them in tofu? I will now cultivate my "morning faces" (Morning Glories) as I say a prayer of Thanksgiving that my toilet is low-tech & doesn't require Japanese language skills to operate - or something similar to a TV control. Betty Reynold's sketchbook is about as opposite as you can get from the sumi-e of mcHAIKU's previous review (# 0806908335) but they each give delight.

No comments about Love Delhi.

2 comments about The Chinese Looking Glass.

1. This is an excellent book for the person wanting to understand Chinese culture from an internal point of view. It helps explain why China's expirement with democracy didn't work and the country's attitude towards western culture. Although some of the information is outdated, it uses several thousand years of history to back up the author's assumption about Chinese attitudes and mores, including such controversial subjects as the Vietnam War and Japanese culture's debt to China. It covers such varied subjects as food, religion (or the lack of), clothing and technology and above all Chinese ideas about these subjects and the world around them.



2. I've been reading and rereading this book for thirty-five years. China from a personal yet objective point of view (British journalist married into an old Chinese family), this is quite simply the best introduction to the subject I know anything about. It is beautifully written, interesting and exciting from beginning to end, and certainly one of the most memorable books on China you will ever read. If you are only going to read one book on Chinese culture and civilization, this is the book to read. But, believe me, you will not want to stop with "The Chinese Looking Glass." Read Bloodsworth's book and you will be hooked on the subject for many years to come.

5 comments about YAK BUTTER BLUES: A Tibetan Trek of Faith.

1. This book was not about a spiritual journey as it states. Rather it is a whiney tale of rich people using poor people for their own betterment. Their reason for the trip? No other westerners had done it, and they'd do it illegally if they had to. Then they complain when someone chooses NOT to allow them to spend the night in their one room house, or don't want to share their already sparce meal with others. When asked for compensation, they haggle over what they should have to spend. This is truly an UNenlightening story.



2. In our over developed world full of luxury and faceless friends - Yak Butter Blues brought me back to a true adventure. Where the human soul and friendship with strangers is at the center of the adventure. Where we are reminded that true adventure means taking risk and facing hardship.
   
   Brandon Wilson and his wife set off an a trek that took them 650 miles over some down right inhospitable landscape all in an attempt to find a piece of their soul not yet found. Following a traditional pilgrims route they attempt what no other western had before them.
   
   The writing was excellent - capturing to the point where I could not put the book down. I loved the mix of insightful writing pared with just the right amount of adventure story, geography lesson, and spiritual commentary. As I love anything and everything from Tibet I found this book to be a real winner. Highly recommend !!



3. Very disappointing... The author and his wife travel through an extremely poor country, Tibet & Nepal. Instead of being self suffient, they rely on the kindness of villagers to supply them with lodging and food for themselves and their horse. They offer to pay very meager sums of money(and often haggle)for the villagers hospitality. It is a shame the author does not show more respect and generosity for these villagers. Instead of haggling with the locals over insignificant amounts of money, the author should of been a generous friendly American offering to help. It only takes small amount of money to help the people in this part of the world. If the author could not of spared the extra couple of hundred dollars to be a responsible traveler, he should not of embarked on this journey.



4. The world moves too fast these days to allow most travelogue books any success. A magazine article or a travel agent's poster is all it takes to send the travel-eager reader off to Luxor or Fez. The brilliant achievements of travel writers like Sir Richard Burton have no place in the twenty-first century. That's obvious, but fortunately it is also incorrect.
   Brandon Wilson's Yak Butter Blues was probably never intended to reach the upper strata of armchair adventuring, but it does. The book is a soaring travel diary. It places the reader in the thick of the action every bit as well as Marco Polo transported Italians to China and, as it seems to me, better than Lowell Thomas led readers in the dust of Lawrence of Arabia.
   I've seen a good part of the world, but when I was young enough to tolerate the grueling realities of Tibet, it seemed impossible--pretty much the way most of the Middle East is out of reach today. Choosing his moment with abandon, but lucking out all the way, Wilson and his wife trekked from Lhasa, Tibet, to Katmandu, Nepal. It's the great pilgrimage of Mahayana Buddhism, walked backward, but it is a remarkable journey. Not one reader in a million will ever make the trek, but I don't think any reader--regardless of age or physical ability--will ever read this book without dreaming of the whole trip.
   Gripping Yak Butter in one hand, hopefully holding a better map than Wilson could find in the other, I want to risk it all by walking the road Wilson walked. I absolutely can't do it. Arthritis... age... cowardice... whatever, I won't do it. But, thanks to Wilson, I will not have missed the trek completely.
   Naturally, a book about Tibet can't get from page one to the end without some mention of Shangri-La. Wilson knew that, so he tossed in the Shangri-La thing early and got it over with. Then he deals with the hard, cold reality for over 200 more pages. This is a trek tale, not a getting-there tale. They were trekking, not hitching. So, with bleeding blisters on his feet and a wife he'd have liked to save from walking in the cold while coughing and aching, Wilson turns down rides.
   They get lost. They get very cold. They are abused at times and treated with remarkable kindness at other times. Till, almost amazingly and yet somehow inevitably, the trek really becomes the spiritual journey it was barely meant to replicate.
   Don't be frightened away. The spiritual side of the trip is just a magical color flashing in the sun on the snow or whisper heard in the Himalayan wind. It never takes over the story, even if it may have been the wind beneath the trekkers wings by the end.
   Hawai`i people may find a very special pathos in Yak butter Blues. The Tibetan people Wilson meets are losing their language and culture, and the author doesn't fail to make the mental and emotional connection to the plight of Hawaiians. He lives here. How could the parallel have been lost on him. You'll see it before he mentions it. You'll feel it before he points to it. (Very akamai writer, yeah?)



5. After reading Brandon Wilson's latest book: "Along The Templar Trail", his adventures in foreign lands so beautifully written inspired me to find out more about another one of his pilgrimages where he and his wife Cheryl walked across Tibet.
   
   "Yak Butter Blues", for me, is a far more interesting, suspenseful, informative, and inspiring adventure than anyone in Hollywood could ever conjure up. The book opens itself up for the reader to join Brandon, Cheryl, and their horse Sadhu to experience what they had to go through to achieve their goal to cross Tibet's very forbidding terrain reserved only for the daring and the brave.
   
   Weakened by hunger, illness, bitter cold, and the daily uncertainty of survival, Brandon and Cheryl's spirit remained strong enough to overcome the never ending obstacles thrown at them. Unlike fiction books where one expects the obligatory climatic ending and life changing epiphanies, this book is an autobiographic account of human survival stretched to its limit, and coming out of it alive is profound enough to change the way you look at life.
   
   The highlight of the book for me was Brandon's creative ability of putting a face to each of the local Tibetans he came across, many of them angels who shared their homes and food with Brandon and Cheryl. Extreme poverty did not harden these Tbetan angels' generous hearts. These are people cut off from the eyes of the Western world, and through Brandon's journey we get a rare glimpse into the life of local Tibetans, the hardships they suffer, and the simple joys that bring a smile on their face.
   
   With recent events involving conditions in Tibet that were painfully brought to light, I strongly recommend Yak Butter Blues as a source of information about the part of the world we know almost nothing about.

No comments about Travels through Northern Persia: 1770-1774.

1 comments about LUXE Ho Chi Minh City (LUXE City Guides).

1. After combing local bookstores and the internet in vain for a peek inside this guide, I decided to gamble $10 to see if it delivered what it promised. I quickly realized why Luxe does not have any screenshots of their guides--they're EMPTY! (1) No map whatsoever of the city. (2) Wanna-be exclusive information that was spare and useless, aimed at wanna-be nouveau-riche xenophobes who don't know how to travel. I imagine a stuffy, ignorant, boor a la Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild would swear by this guide.

5 comments about Magic Tree House #5: Night of the Ninjas (A Stepping Stone Book(TM)).

1. Raymond Georges 3/13/06
   
   Ms. Hillgardner Class: English
   
   Title: Magic Tree House #5
   
   Night of the Ninjas
   
   Author: Mary pope Osborne
   
   Illustrator: Sal Murdocca
   
   Jack and Annie the two main characters. They go to the magic Tree house. It whisks them to ancient Japan. Their mission is to find their friend Morgan, while their friend Jack and Annie get seen by two ninjas. Jack saw them as a treat so he was very caution. They followed the Ninjas through valley up mountains and in the forest. They saw a few samurai warriors who were looking for the ninjas since they are with them the samurai see jack and Annie as emesis.
   On their little journey they way of Jack and Annie met the ninja Master. He told Jack and Annie," Use nature be nature, Follow nature, if you use these three things you will find your way to the tree house and find your friend Morgan pg 38. I'm not going to tell you anymore because I do not want to spoil it



2. This book is a very nice mystery chapter book. When you finish it, you want to add a chapter or 2. This book is mostly about ninjas. Jack and Annie have a big problem to solve. Their friend, Molly, was in a trap! She sends them a letter. It says, "Help! In a land of ninjas! In a tree house!" Jack and Annie are afraid! They want to help Molly but they can't, that's because they don't know how to get to ninja's land. I won't tell you any more. If you want to know more, then read the book. I think it's a good book to read.



3. Night of the Ninjas
   By Mary Pope Osborne
   
   Would you like to hear about a book called Night of the Ninjas? The two main characters are Jack and Annie. They find a Magic Tree House that allows them to travel through time. In this book, they go back to the time of the ninjas. They are captured and taken to the head ninja. I'm not telling what's next. The series is Magic Tree House. This is book number five. Read the book to find out what happens to Jack and Annie.
   
   Terry, 7 years old
   Cunniff School
   Watertown, MA.



4. My 1st grader hates to put it down, he would rather read Magic Tree House books, than play video games. He even reads them to his class and explains the story for show and tell. In his kindergarten class the teacher would also let him read the Magic Tree House books out loud, not to give her a break, but to promote reading out loud. Great books!



5. ISBN 0679863710 - Books in series for kids aren't new - Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, the Bobbsey Twins.. right on through to the Babysitters Club and Goosebumps - they've been out there for generations. This series, however, does seem to have a slightly younger target audience than most and that, in my opinion, is a very good thing. The younger they're hooked, the harder it is to give up the habit, and reading is a habit you want to encourage.
   
   Jack and Annie are headed home from the library, wondering where Morgan and the Magic Tree House are and when she and it might return. Annie runs off into the forest and sees that it has returned! The only question is - where's Morgan? A note is found, along with a mouse, and the kids have the tree house whisk them away to Japan, sometime in the 14th-17th centuries, where they are meet ninjas and flee from samurai warriors and gather the first of four items they will need to rescue their friend. They return home in time for dinner, but they still haven't found Morgan!
   
   I have a few problems with the book - for one, the kids go to Japan and meet some ninjas who speak fluent English. Or the kids unknowingly speak fluent Japanese. Either way, they're able to communicate without trouble. Jack makes small notes as he goes, like "ninjas were warriors in old Japan", but there's little effort made to delve too deeply into anything informative. Not that every book in the world needs to be educational, but it feels very much like a missed opportunity. Last is the obvious fact that book #5 comes nowhere near being complete, as Morgan is still missing. It's one thing to hope your readers will return for book #6, it's another thing altogether to split a story that way - whether it's a kids' book or a book for an older audience, every book should stand alone and allow a latecomer to the series to jump in at any point without feeling lost.
   
   Still, I take only one star away for all of that because I think TMTH has tons of potential. This book was action packed, fast paced and full of exciting adventure and kids will enjoy that. What they enjoy, they will read! The prologue, to bring you up to speed, is a help. The back cover says RL 1.9, ages 6-9. I think the more likely audience age group is 5-7 and these chapter books would make an excellent jumping off point to learn about other cultures with Mom and/or Dad's help.

4 comments about Shanghai.

1. This is a work of exceptional richness and observation. Beautifully constructed and written -the author draws from converations across the work, the most sensual yet critically insightful portrait of this strangely synthetic city. Having reviwed much of the literature of prewar Shanghai, Ms. Sergeant's work gives the most complete sense of life and death of the city and of the culture.



2. While living in Shanghai I made a point of buying memoirs or oral histories of the old China-Coast communities. This book was the least informative, most fatueous one of the lot. Ms. Sergeant obviously had impeccable connections through her husbands business contacts into the upper reachs of the old Hong families and managed to say nothing interesting. Not even gossip.



3. The most memorable part of this fine, absorbing account of pre-war Shanghai is the description of the horrific factory conditions in the Chinese- and Western- owned businesses there. Here are tales right out of Dickens! I realized, unfortunately, that the unsavoury reputation of modern China's horrible factories has a long and sad history. The description of girls from the chrome plating factories with "chromium holes eating into their arms" was particularly awful.

   The book is also full of interesting stories and anecdotes of all aspects of old Shanghai - the parties, social gatherings, etc, and carries on right up to the communist takeover (when newer and even more devestating things happened). Many interesting photographs. For anyone who's been to the city recently and seen how much of the pre-war architecture survives, this book will be a treat. The author gets a little lost at the end - perplexed (sarcastic?) at Europe's seeming abandonment of the place to the Japanese without a fight, though it seems obvious that London was more worth saving than a ruthless mercantile city like Shanghai - kind of a pre-war Hong Kong is what it was, and clearly from these pages not so much glamorous as crass. Well-worth the read, this book will give the reader much food for thought as to China's current direction and unhealthy work conditions. Must Peking try so hard to follow in the ways of its more ruthless ancestors?

   Another good description of Shanghai's interesting and horrible sides is W. H. Auden's and Christopher Isherwood's 1930's account, "Journey to a War."




4. Through her skillful narration interspersed with rich vignettes, Sergeant delved into the fate, suffering and individual triumphs of 4 representative strata of the pre-World War II Shanghai society ¨C the English (the snobbish old colonial master), the Japanese (nouveau rich old-colonial-slaves-turned-new-colonial-master), the White Russians (the royalist Russians abandoned by fate and humiliated by self-degradation), and the Chinese (downtrodden colonial slaves seemingly condemned to unending cycles of oppression from within and outside its own community) ¨C in so doing Sergeant succeeded in vividly recreating the eerily exciting pulse and ambience an extraordinary city unique to the social, economic and political climate of its time.

   As a modernized China re-engages the world confident of its destiny on one hand and betraying insecurity about its traumatic past on the other, Sargeant's work is an essential background reading for any foreigner with a serious interest in engaging China at a deeper level.