1 comments about First Pass Under Heaven: One man's 4000-kilometre trek along the Great Wall of China.

1. I thoroughly enjoyed Alone on the Great Wall by William Lindesay several years ago so I was very excited to read this book. It was excellent. I congratulate Nathan on his perseverence to complete this amazing journey and the many successes that it brought him. Anyone interested in the Great Wall or in well-written tales of extraordinary adventure will savor this unforgettable story.

No comments about Visions of Myanmar.

No comments about The Great Wall Revisited: From the Jade Gate to Old Dragon's Head.

No comments about The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India.

5 comments about Caucasus.

1. I've always felt much safer following novelists into non-fiction than say biographers, or historians into the realms of fiction. Griffin, who has written a couple of historical novels, is on familiar, though foreign ground. His fictional stories seem to examine cruelty and hope and his first work of non-fiction is no exception. It's a mixture of many genres, all neatly rolled into a short, decisive book. The Caucasus is one of those places, much like the Balkans, which used to confuse me to the point where I'd rather turn the page. But Griffin keeps everything simple and clear, following myths, history and politics along the lines of an expanding Christian nation (Russia) and a defensive Islamic nation (what came to be called Chechnya, Dagestan and Azerbaijan). This book is obviously more topical than the author thought when starting it four years ago. My only complaint is in the inclusion of the author's own travels. At first, it didn't feel as if they merited belonging, but once you catch the writer's drift, that everything is really very close to how it was two hundred years ago, his aims become more and more apparent. Caucasus is blessedly easy to read, and that's no mean feat.



2. There is no doubt whatever that this book is exceptionally written, bordering in parts on the poetic. Alas, Griffin's romanticization of the Murid wars which consumed the better part of 50 years, from the 1820s through the 1860s, leaves a great deal to be desired, mostly because Griffin did absolutely no work to place these wars into the historical context of the global Islamic jihad, which began with Mohammed's reign of terror in the Jewish and other non-Muslim communities of seventh century Arabia, and continued throughout Islamic history, wherever non-Muslim communities abutted Islamic ones.
   
   Griffin describes, for example, the particularly horrific capture of some princely wives and children from an idyllic estate in the southern Caucasus and their entrapment for many months with the wives of the leading jihadi of the era, including at least one Armenian woman, herself a victim of the historical Islamic tradition of entrapment and enslavement of non-Muslim women and children forced to submit to Islamic life and law.
   
   To Griffin, however, this episode, along with every other bloody exploit of the Islamic warriors was somehow justifiable, despite the fact that the so called victims began the wars when Islamic chieftains and their brigands encroached upon Russian communities along their borders to rape, pillage, thieve and otherwise harras their neighbors on the northern frontier.
   
   Griffin sets these wars into a text that spans his journey of several months through the region in the 1990s, before the Russian counter-terror operations in Grozny again reached a crescendo late in the decade. It is passingly interesting to learn of the various drunkards with whom he traversed the region, but wholly unimportant except as a window onto a way of life that continues in the tradition of Islamic jihad.
   
   Unfortunately, Griffin draws upon the equally false and romanticized musings of Leo Tolstoy, whose last novel eulogized a central figure in the Murid wars, Haji Murid, who despite his Islamisist attitudes and barbarities, occasionally demonstrated kindness, as when he won back Tolstoy's ruinous gambling losses and returned the promissory notes to the famed novelist the next morning.
   
   Certainly there have been many ugly eras in Russian history, but it is historical outrage to suggest that 19th century Russian treatment of Muslims (after all, resulting from ceaseless Muslim assaults on Russian communities near the Caucasus) in any way justified Muslim slaughters of Russians during those horrible decades.
   
   Worse, the account ignores massive historical evidence of 1,400 years of Islamic human rights abuses (of which the Murid wars were just a tiny microcosm). Griffin presents 19th century terrorists as somehow heroic and awesome, a pattern repeated in modern reporting on the continuing jihad.
   
   I am sorry, but I miss the romance in stealing other people's women and children, murdering the stragglers, tying naked nursemaids to trees and reigning death on legions of entrapped Russian soldiers whose sole purpose was in the first place to protect Russian communities from Islamic terror.
   
   Now, history repeats.
   
   --Alyssa A. Lappen



3. This is a relatively quick read about a film crews travels in the Caucasus Mountains. There are two stories here. The first is the story of the travels in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, and Chechnya. Then there is the story of Iman Shamil, a leader of the Avars and Chechens who led the revolt against the encroaching Russian Empire. Shamil led the revolt that took the Russians thirty years to suppress. This revolt was termed the Murid Wars. It cost the Russians dearly. In the end the revolt was quelled when the Russians cut down the trees that constituted the hiding places of the rebels. Both sides were vicious in dealing with the civilian population. This harks to the present conflict which is just as destructive and vicious as the one of old, if not worst. This book is interweaved with these two stories. The one distraction with this book is the exploits of Ilya, an Uzbek Jew who causes trouble with the other film crew members.
   This sheds light on a little known conflict. The book is an easy read, but I wish the author had concentrated on one story, rather than two.



4. The author falls into the usual mistake of Caucasus writers: he believes in the mythology of the noble mountain warrior. His search for the fantoms of Imam Shamil is pretty shallow and amateur. The reader would probably want to go for real fiction instead and buy Leslie Blanch's Sabres of Paradise. For those who want something serious (more than the boring ride of a young hype journalist in a decrepit Zhigouli across the Caucasus) go for Yo'av Karny's Highlanders.



5. OK, so Nicholas Griffin's got a knack for writing. You can't fault him on his skills: he vividly traces the life of the famous (to some) Caucasus mountain warrior leader, Shamil, who held off the Russians for over three decades in the nineteenth century. He weaves in the lives of various Russians and others (including a French woman captive) who knew him or had to deal with him, shows how the Russians consistently misjudged their ability to capture or kill him and bring the resistance of the Muslim mountaineers of the north Caucasus to a halt. In their misguided tactics, the Russians wasted the lives of thousands of their own men, and killed huge numbers of Chechen, Avar, and Lezgin villagers (not to mention a host of other, smaller peoples) to almost no avail. Shamil was able to unite the usually-fractured tribes of the region under the banner of Islam, though he was not above murdering dissenters. Griffin has brought the amazing, violent story of the long anti-Russian resistance to Western readers again, albeit with a fair measure of mythology and little background information for those "few readers" who aren't up on Caucasian ethnography.
   
   But that's not all. He set off with four companions on a very dazed, unorganized trip around the Caucasus region with minimal preparation and planning. His skillful writing contrasts almost hilariously with the group's utter inability to get along or even to know what to do next. The "interpreter" can hardly speak English and is plastered out of his mind most of the time. Nobody seems to know anything about the customs or languages of the people they meet (and need to survive). They drink vodka, bicker, and fight, and even take up using boxing gloves against each other to the great amusement of some lower-depths locals. Becoming drunken clowns hardly is the way to learn about history or culture, no matter how "untouristy" it may seem to the participants. And, though Shamil came from Dagestan, and many of his supporters came from Chechnya, and many famous battles occurred in those two places, the group failed to get across the border into Russia at all. They did spend a fair bit of time in Armenia, though, where nobody had even heard of Shamil. They didn't seem to be able to figure out why not. Nice going, boys.
   
   So, it's a grab bag. But, I do admit, a well-written grab bag which I enjoyed a lot. The parallels between Shamil the Imam's war against Russia and the two Chechen wars since 1994, the last of which is still sputtering on, are clear. Quite a few errors that I (a non-expert) could pick up. I wonder what the experts would say. On page 129, he's got Shamil at the wrong age. He says Armenian is the oldest alphabet. It's not---google Bishop Mashtots and see. He writes "Arzrum" instead of the international "Erzurum". On page 188, he talks of the railways carrying the Chechen exiles south from Grozny in 1944---uh, that would be east or north. On page 224---he mentions Basayev's attack on Chechnya in 1994. It was Dagestan, no? These may be pedantic quibbles, but they also may indicate that the editing, like the trip itself, was a bit chaotic and ill-considered. But if you get this book, you will enjoy it anyhow.

No comments about The Travels of Marco Polo: Edited by Peter Harris (Everyman's Library (Cloth)).

4 comments about Looking for Chengdu: A Woman's Adventures in China (Anthropology of Contemporary Issues).

1. I lived in Japan for 9 years and this is a book I want to give friends who ask what it was like. Even though this book is about China, and China and Japan are not the same thing, reading this book helped me to understand much about what I had seen and been through in my own experience. Yes! Yes! Yes! I kept saying when I read it. This is how it was. And here is somebody putting it into words.

   There are the underlying truths about Asia, and greater yet underlying truths about crossing between any two cultures. Finally, there are the truths about any woman's life whether she stays home or travels far. Hill Gates calls them as we all have seen them, from getting your period to getting your hair cut in a foreign land. There are the long van rides that constitute "vacations," the forced alcohol, the question of breakfast foods, unheated living quarters, unexplained prohibitions, glorious discoveries of beautiful scenery, and the eternal question of whether being a foreigner means you're also actually a woman.

   But most of all, it's about the work. In this case, the work is anthropology. Here again, universal truths apply. Good work gives you an adequate struggle. You want to solve things, you want to apply your own talents. You want to learn and contribute, get and give, laugh and cry. Really, you do. You hope to be changed by it and come back with something to report. You enjoy sinking into the luxuries and comforts of your own familiar culture once you make it back to dry land. And then, one day down the road, you get that hankering to leave those comforts again...What a privilege having this life is. All it costs is the belief that you have control over anything.

   My favorite quote from the book ought to warn off anyone who thinks you get to control your own dignity once you choose to put yourself out there. Gates nails it as she observes that, "When it comes to etiquette, the home team has the advantage."




2. Perhaps a third of the book is about traveling in China, mostly in southwestern China, where private enterprise blossomed during the 1980s. The other two thirds are about trying to do research funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, sponsored and administered by the Sichuan Fulian (Women's Federation--literally "Women United"). Anthropologists' fieldwork memoirs are published after more academic presentation of their research results--in Gates's case, a 1997 book _China's Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism_ (that compares what she observed in the 1970s in Taiwan, historical records, and her 1987-96 research in Sichuan). The discomforts, including sickness, depression, frustrations about transportation, food, lodging, access to information, and the misunderstanding by "the natives" of the anthropologist's wisdom and good-will may not be vented in public at all.

   Although the author is the major character in the account of her research in the years before and after the crackdown of the PRC gernotacry on private consumption and the accumulation of riches by anyone other than the families of high-placed officials, unlike much contemporary postmodernist anthropology, Gates remains interested in the agency of people (particularly women) trying to prosper in changing and difficult conditions in societies organized differently than the anthropologists' own one. Gates is engagingly honest about her frustrations with Chinese life as well as her joys of solidarity with those she studied and the reader learns some things about living through rapid change in the Chinese interior from her insightful book.




3. Yes, I have read some of Gates' work, but not this one - it doesn't matter in this system. I am merely balancing a double counting of a positive textual review that registers numerically as a zero, thus artificially generating a very low average.
   On balance Amazon reviews are useful, but the lack of control leads to this sort of nonsense. Note also the lack of signature on the doubled review; presumably just an error but one wonders given the recent Canadian site boondoggle with these reviews.



4. This book is a memoir of a decade past written following a Rockerfeller grant to study the women's emancipation movement in SW PRChina, to later compare and contrast with a similar study in Taipei, Taiwan. This fieldwork is undertaken with the cooperation of the Propaganda Dept, Women's Federation, Chengdu, Szechwan province, PRChina.

   Structurally this book is a daily diary which covers, in part, her travels in China as well as some highlights of 100 interviews on women-owned, small business entrepreneurs, that were formed during the Deng's Reform and Opening campaign of the late 80s.

   Her POE is Guangzhou, where she decides to initially travel alone much as the natives do. Her travel scenarios, including her visit to Kunming, City of Eternal Spring, in the first 50 pages of the book, where she had local academic acquaintances to show her the sights. She speaks Putonghua, a form of Mandarin, so she can slowly communicate with the locals in a basic form. It appears that she does not like reading Chinese. In part, she writes with the older Wade-Giles form of romanization, so Szechwan is Sichuan and Taipei is Taibei. Armed with an Academy letter, she uses it to travel, as best she can to cajole the ticket sellers and hostel and guesthouse desks, the way the natives do, and cites prices in RMB, and FEC only when there is no other alternative or she wishes to splurge with a hot bath.

   The more memorable scenarios is her visit to Kunming, capital of the mountainous Yunnan province p36-44 in December 1988. They travel up the Burma Road a bit and discuss the minority people and their distinctive dress p54-8. She eats the native food and promptly gets a bad case of diarrhea, spends two days in bed. She buys a beautiful Naxi cape from a leather maker that was destined to be another bride's dowry.

   Halfway through her anthropological project, her tired workgroup of four demands that she take vacation and unknownst to her, her host department arranged a 7-day holiday with a drive and excursion into far Western Szechwan province to enjoy the Fall colors and stay with a Tibetan family p109-138. Anticipating a boring trip and getting behind in her project, she crankily accompanies the group during another PMS episode. Contrary to her expectation, she enjoys the trip immensely, romps in the forest, and sees blue sky. At each stop, there are local Women's Federation reps to show the group around and introduce them to native families, translate discussions, and describe what they are seeing. They discuss the Tibetan-Han dichotomy and how each culture tries to co-exist.

   There are about 20 scenarios on interviews on women-owned businesses in the book. Most businesses are small, from mom & pop format to ones with handfuls of employees. They are the stereotypical grocery, restaurant, garment, and etc format. What I got out of the book was that women's survival during the "Great Leap Forward" and Cultural Revolution was very harsh, especially in the countryside. Initially the Politburo encouraged formation of these businesses, the owners used the profits to improve their houses, and then the tax collectors came to even things out in the socialist's tradition. So the Politburo is inventing their policies at time goes. It seeds flourishing entrepreneur until they become successful, then taxes them for an increased revenue stream.

   Her writing is fairly well crafted and she discusses scenarios of general interest, so that one can finish the book without getting truly bored of repetitious fieldwork details. The book, divided into 19 chapters, includes about 20 photos of subjects, maps and travel itineries to follow along. There is no index and any notes are referenced on the bottom of the page. Comparatively, I would consider her prose better and more comprehensive than Paul Theroux, a China travel writer covering the same time period. But Peter Hessler is a better describer of Chinese thought and behavior; of course he spent 2 years at a teachers college and learned the local dialect. But as indicated in the preface, she notes her literary limits and includes her published bibliography of academic work.

   The author is a Canadian born, UK raised and educated, who writes in UK prose, so you have to decipher the usual suspects that differ in UK vs US English. She earns her doctorate at Central Michigan U, but is at heart a Brit feminist, and constantly refers to it during her sojourn. From time to time this divorced, pre-menopausal woman titillates the reader with her fantasies as a ravishing redhead in China. To me this was pulp-fiction that the editors must have required her to put in the scripts to help sales. I could have also done without the monthly PMS issues.

   She keeps contemporaneous notes on her notebook computer, so hopefully 10 years later, she doesn't over embellish or forget the details of her 6 month sojourn in Chengdu. I read this book at a local library.

   She attempts to unify her prose by introducing a historical mentor that went before her, a fellow Brit, Ms Isabella Bird Bishop, who does China research in Szechwan a century earlier. Since she merely references her work in a couple pages p48-9, I find it rather distracting, yet amused that she compared her journey to hers.

4 comments about The Last Filipino Head Hunters.

1. David Howard's photojournalism in "The Last Filipino Head Hunters" does an excellent job of documenting these tribal people and their way of life. Along with photos of their wonderful and often ancient faces, the book captures their jewelry, carvings, fabrics, and tattoos.

   As tattoo reference, Howard's book stands alone in its thorough photo documentation of many traditional Filipino male and female designs. This tattoo documentation holds special significance as the elders (some over 100 years old) who wear them are beginning to die out.

   The first person narrative text is fun and informative but a little sparse. It is part history and part travelogue, including wonderful tales of people from the Kalinga and Ifugao tribes.

   Sadly, the print quality is slightly substandard and some of the photographs are noticeably low in resolution, but the stunning content largely makes up for this.




2. The main attraction of this book is the brilliant photography. This was given to me as a birthday present while I was actually in the area covered by the book. I was disappointed that he did not visit the eastern Cordillera Igorots with which I am familiar.

   Mr. Howard's experiences are amusing and too true to life, but I found some of his conclusions erroneous and he seemed a bit too credulous towards everything he was told. He is obviously an outsider to this culture, and as such the locals tended to embellish a bit, and he bought it all. I am an honorary member of this culture by marriage. Concerning the ages of the interviewees, I highly doubt the statements he documents. This culture had no idea about keeping time until the government required it. I have spent a dozen years trying to forensically figure out the ages of my own father and mother-in-law; and there is considerable doubt about the actual age of my wife, who was born sometime between 1960 and 1965. The only historical benchmark most of these people have is the Japanese occupation during WWII. If the author had done a little more questioning, I'm sure he could have gotten some much better stories. I found some of his observations a bit condescending due to lack of familiarity, for example the reference to "cheap gin" as a medium of exchange. In actual fact the Ginebra San Miguel is a standard social fixture throughout northern Luzon, and normally no gathering of men is without a bottle, but foreign outsiders are rarely party to such gatherings. He draws an incomplete conclusion about the poverty of the Ifugao landholder who couldn't afford to provide a pig for the celebration. I'm sure if he had an honest opinion of some of the more reliable townsfolk, they would have let him know that the this landowner was a worthless drunk who couldn't even manage something as simple as a farm. My in-laws are subsistence farmers in the jungle a dozen miles beyond the road, and they are wealthy enough to have sent 10 kids through college, through raising and selling animals.

   Nevertheless, this book gives a good insight into the motivations of these people. I more clearly understood the need for tribal war and peace pacts which have given me more than one wrinkled brow since I got married. The narrative is very accurate, just not the conclusions. My own family has a set of the gongs with the human jawbone handles. They claim they are Japanese; I don't know if that's the truth or if they are soft-selling their actual origin to the white cousin to avoid offending me. You won't go wrong with this book.




3. excellent read. more of a travel journal than a scientific piece. but still give plenty of ethnographic information. i think the native Filipinos are not studied as much as say the Asmat of New Guinea or the Dyak of Borneo because the Philippines are considered 'modern'. but once you get outside the major cities you are right back in the isolated jungle.



4. I found this book through the amazon website and found it very interesting. I did not know about the existence of this book and had never seen it in a bookshop. I am delighted that I could find it in this way.

5 comments about The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters.

1. Age of Kali is a fascinating read. I have been to or lived at many places Dalrymple writes about in this book and so I can relate to what he says.
   I must admit that insights that he brings out are much deeper than my own even when I spent years living in those places. The most interesting chapters are that of Vrindavan, Sri Lanka and Hyderabad. The section on Bombay was a bit of a drag, particularly when after having written so brilliantly so far he got stuck with Baba Sehgal and Shobha De (the latter only a few English speaking people know anyway) and missed the pulse of Bombay.
   Both Bihar and Pakistan were equally depressing (not because of Mr Dalrymple), though insightful at the same time.
   This is a great read, cover to cover but appears more of a collection of essays written at different times rather than a fluent continuous travelogue. Imran Khan's story could have been cut short by several pages and the author's journey into Reunion Island, though fascinating in its own right, seems like a chapter from another book.
   There are flashes of brilliance in a wonderfully written piece but also dots of passable text.
   Overall a brilliantly written book about an extremely complex people and difficult times with the elegance of a master story teller and pathos of a native.



2. Wonderfull stories from India and Pakistan - unusual and well-told, but my Lonely Planet edition began to fall apart the moment I opened the book. After three days, all the pages fell out. Sorry about that, sez LP. Uh, yeah, thanks.



3. Some writers work harder than others. They write better than others. And they do it in a way that's so fluid and relaxed. William Dalrymple surely is one of those. You could pick up a Dalrymple book blindly, and expect to enter a world that's interesting, rich, crazy, chaotic and wonderful all at once.
   
   I've read most of his books. And I'd say you just couldn't go wrong with William Dalrymple--or the Age of Kali for that matter.



4. There are only a few things I'd like to add to the existing reviews of this book:
   
   1. In this book Mr Dalrymple is not really a traveller/travel writer, but more of a political journalist. He visits various regions and discusses their political situation/problems, with an in-depth look at the Bhutto Dynasty in Pakistan wrapping up the book. If you're looking for travel literature about India, look elsewhere!
   
   2. In addition to the stories from a few chosen regions in India, the book also has quite a bit about Pakistan in it, as well as a visit to Reunion, which actually is a piece of French territory, very close to Madagascar. The link to India is fairly weak, and it seems as if it was just included to make the book sufficiently thick.
   
   For what it is, though, it's a decent piece of literature!



5. This book was a fascinating and sad eye-opener, especially for someone who knows so little about India outside of one major city. The author has done his research. Bill Bryson couldn't have done better.

1 comments about A Guide to the Japanese Stage: From Traditional to Cutting Edge (Origami Classroom).

1. Japanese theater is at once compelling and uninviting. Compelling, due to its flamboyant and exotic nature, with the outrageous flair of Kabuki, and the obfuscation and mystery of the masks of Noh and the puppets of Bunraku. Uninviting, because of the ancient and ceremonial language, the centuries old symbolism and buried nature of the storyline. Even to Japanese people, the worlds of Japanese theater can be a complex and incomprehensible realm, requiring significant amounts of study before appreciation. Like Shakespeare, the more familiar one becomes with the meter of the language and the flow of the story, the more one can enjoy the pathos and humor.
   
   "A Guide to the Japanese Stage" is a fine introduction to Japanese theater, both traditional and contemporary. It showcases the four main styles of traditional theater, Kabuki, Noh, Bunraku and Kyogen, then offers a whirlwind tour of all the variety of modern plays and dances. The traditional theaters are covered in-depth, complete with popular play synopsises, styles of make-up, origins, famous actors, clothing and a surprising amount of detail for such a manageable book.
   
   Packed with photographs, the stunning visual element is richly displayed. While definitely not a photo-book, "A Guide to Japanese Stage" illustrates the text with examples of wigs, masks, puppets and all the stunning flair that is a hallmark of Japanese theater. There is a nice collection of Yakusha-e, popular woodblock prints of Kabuki actors that have been sold over the years during performances. Further illustrations detail the male, female and special masks of Noh, the significance of the make-up styles of kumadori Kabuki make-up and the various quick costume changes and special effects of Kabuki.
   
   Unlike most books on Japanese theater, modern theater is given its due as well, covering such things as Super Kabuki, Takarazuka's all-woman musical revue, Western-influenced Shingeki, and the grotesque dance of Butoh. Japan's theatrical tradition certainly doesn't end with the four classic styles, and an amazing breadth of work is on display. This is a rarely-covered area, and very interesting.
   
   Immediately after reading "A Guide to the Japanese Stage," I went to see a Kabuki performance and it was astounding how much more appreciation I had from previous performances I had seen. Able to recognize the "mie" poses, knowing the purpose of the onnagata dance, and able to piece together the plot from the "typical play" synopsises of the book, it was a much more rewarding experience. True appreciation of these theater forms does only come from years of study and exposure, but this book is an excellent place to begin this journey. I look forward to learning more, and to experiencing more Japanese theater armed with my new insight.