5 comments about China.

1. This is physically a huge book, very big and very heavy. It is a collection of spectacular photographs of China, plus some very interesting and informative writings. I saw it first in a friend's house, and thought it must cost a fortune. The price quoted in Amazon is amazing low.
   After lugging it around my living room, I only wish there is a DVD version so that I can look at all the photos on my big computer screen and set up a folder of my own favorites.



2. for me purchasing this book of photos was a gamble. i did not get a chance to flip through the various pages before taking it home with me. and for the first time i came out a winner. this hercules sized book holds various themes. for those who lived in china or been there, would find nostalgia as you turn the crisp pages. for those who never been to china, looking through this book would be a vacation all its own. the author not only tackles the traditional scenes but also the present. as describes above this book was a compilation of 20+ years of a journey throughout china. enjoy!

   the only frown was the order of the captions. i felt that it should of been put in the order in which the picture was taken. other than that, it's great.




3. This is clearly a labor of love. Most of the photos are printed centerfold style across both pages and bled to the edge. Each of these photos deserves to be displayed this way. The captions are in a separate section at the back of the book. This forces you study the photo without surrendering to the superficial urge to have someone explain what you're looking at. The subtle detail, the awesome colors, light and shading, the absolutely incredible eye of this photographer are truly amazing. The text is as descriptive, informative and creative as the photos. I've sat for hours at a time with this book and look forward to studying it for many hours more. This book is giving me a whole new perspective for first trip to China this summer. For anyone who wants to glimpse the heart of China this is a "must have".



4. This is a rich, glossy photobook of China. I bought the book because my family has ties to China. Wonderful pictures, a delight to the eye.



5. This book would have been more aptly call "A Day in China".Many of the photos in this book look quite random to me.There are too many portaits of gawky chinamen smoking cigarettes.This does however capture many of the goings-on in the typical day of modern China(with portraits of monks,fisherman,factory workers,etc.There isn`t many awe inspiring landscapes and cityscapes in this book(although there are some)Over all I think this books documentary qualities outway its aesthetic qualities.

No comments about Hedda Morrison's Hong Kong: Photographs & Impressions 1946-47.

No comments about Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, including a summer in the Upper Karun region and a visit to the Nestorian rayahs: Volume 2.

4 comments about A Guide to Ethnic Food in Los Angeles: Restaurants, Markets, Bakeries, Specialty Shops for the Food of Cambodia, China, Ethiopia, Greece, Guatemala,.

1. When this book first came out about 10 yrs. ago or more it was a revelation. In one collection it guided you through EVERY major ethnic community in the greater L.A. region and told you which were the best restaurants, bakeries, markets, etc. I don't know of any other book that comes to close to being this comprehensive & incisive.

   If you ever spend any time in L.A. & you are interested in ethnic food, you must have this book.




2. This is the greatest book on the best ethnic restaurants in LA. Hopefully, the author will put out a new edition. I have it. It's about 10 years old, and I'm not going to sell it. It's better than any new guide out there. Even if you don't go to these places, it's an interesting read.



3. This is a fantastic compendium of ethnic food in LA. It gives you everything you'd ever want to know: best bakeries, best markets, best restaurants. It divides categories by geography (important in LA) & by ethnic cuisines.

   While the 1992 printing will make some info out of date (restaurants for example), this book is one of a kind & the best in its genre.




4. Although 13 years old, much of the info in this book is still relevant. Despite the youthfulness of Los Angeles, there are restaurants and markets that have managed to survive for decades. These places are invariably great and almost institutions in their community. Hence, many of the listings in Burum's book still survive in this megapolis. You'll have fun tracking down that obscure German sausage maker who has had his shop for some 30 years...as well as the occassional let down upon discovering that the old Japanese immigrant, who made fresh tofu daily at the back of his grocery store, decided to call it quits a few years ago.
   
   This book is not only a guide to the ethnic markets in LA, but also serves as an introduction to the cuisine of LA's ethnic groups. Interspersed within the listings, you'll find glimpses into the history of LA's immigrant communities, and what they really eat that you don't get at the mainstream ethnic restaurants. If you're the type that prefers to eat where you're the only one not of the ethnic group the restaurant caters to, get this book. It lets you in on not just the basics of a people's cuisine, but makes you feel comfortable with the unfamiliar (and much more authentic] dishes.
   
   The book is organized into the following chapters, which fairly represents the demographics of Los Angeles:
   China; Japan; Korea; Thailand; Vietnam; Southeast Asian [Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Phillipines]; India; Mexico; Central/South America and Caribbean; Europe; Greece, the Middle East and Africa.
   
   Overall, an indispensable introduction to LA's greatest asset: It's diversity of people and cuisine.

No comments about Inside China Today: A Western View.

No comments about Imperial Gazetteer of India. Provincial Series: Baluchistan.

3 comments about 8W8 - Global Space Tribes.

1. Ralf Hirt's 8W8 Global Space Tribes goes beyond the concept of a flat
   world, it draws the reader into a virtual "What if?" reality. What if
   the Internet could be used to erase national borders and
   ethno-cultural divides creating entirely new social systems... global
   space tribes!
   
   Taking a ride in Hirt's 8W8 Global Space Tribes' Helicopter is more
   than experiencing the Web 3.0 envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee as "an
   overlay of scalable vector graphics (with) everything rippling and
   folding and looking misty:" it's entering a 5-D world where Time and
   Space serve as connective tissue further compressing an already
   flattened world.
   
   Eschewing technical jargon that could alienate the average
   non-techgeek, Hirt, instead, introduces the reader to 15 individuals
   who call themselves the Golden Sky. They are an IT think tank composed
   of international business people, lawyers, politicians,
   environmentalists, a musician, a doctor and a philosopher, all of whom
   share one thing in common--a futuristic vision of the future. They come
   together on the Big Island of Hawaii, in the home of one of their
   members, Winston Chee, an IT entrepreneur, for a week-long break out
   in which they intend to focus on an IT conundrum: how to make the
   invisible, visible.
   
   The author cleverly uses the house, itself, as a living entity that,
   in many ways, embodies many of the same elements as their quest.
   Called EA-RA, it is a six-story mansion built into the side of a
   mountain. It's exterior is a semicircular sheet of black glass infused
   with golden fiber which faces south and stretches in a semicircle 180
   degrees from east to west. The effect is that it not only catches the
   sunrise but the setting sun as well, all the while reflecting the
   sun's rays like a golden mirror. Unseen and undetected from outside is
   the vast interior which encloses a self-sustaining environment
   including a farm on its ground floor, the entire panoply and
   requisites of a modern spa and convention center on the the five top
   floors, all of which are hidden from view to the outside observer.
   
   The hero of the piece is a San Francisco based IT journalist called
   Oskar Kiernan Feller, or more commonly called by his friends, O.K.
   Fellow. He is probably a manifestation of the author, himself,
   conflicted and driven. It is O.K. Fellow whom we first meet as he sits
   in an airplane flying from San Francisco to an IT conference in
   Berlin. It is a trip he has made many times in the past, but on this
   trip he is gripped with a sense of anxiety. He has flown millions of
   miles without an incident, but his mind has made a calculation that at
   some point there had to be a "statistical fluctuation" which might
   result in...? He tries to stop thinking about it by repeating a mantra
   silently to himself.
   
   Ultimately, somewhere over St. Louis he experiences an existential
   moment when he begins to question what he is seeing. That results in a
   dialectical switch where, for a moment, he is watching himself trying
   to find like-minded individuals among the houses and buildings below.
   We are introduced to all the main characters in the first two
   chapters. Except for their different vocations, they all share the
   same uneasiness as O.K. Fellow. They want to see the unseen elements
   of their world. For some, it's a search to find people as
   themselves,for the others, it is to be able to see the actual flow of
   elements into streams and rivers which make up what they call "Global
   Space Tribes."
   
   Eventually, they develop the concept of a virtual helicopter which
   they imagine could hover above the earth with an instrument panel.
   This tool could discern hidden values from single elements to
   concentrations of elements, "mountains," as they eventually see them.
   
   This is a fast and enjoyable read for both the lay reader as well as
   the technophile.



2. "8W8 Global Space Tribes" leads us trough a flattened pre-Columbian InterWorld which defines the next metamorphosis of the Internet Web 3, and perhaps beyond. Rather than following a convoluted trail through a multidimensional world, the writer brings us to one spot, a vortex where all aspects of our physical world come together; where each individual identifies her or himself as a member of a tribe. Members of these tribes can be living in the Amazon, the Urals or Nebraska, however, more than a common mindset knits these tribes together: they share a common weltanschauung.
   
   Using the clever device of a helicopter (8W8 Heli), resources, markets and capital flow can be mapped like rain water forming rivulets; then streams, rivers and, ultimately oceans. For me as a businessperson and a fan of new technologies, this book has been awesome since it reveals what, hithertofore, had been invisible... the "Golden" flow.



3. Wow! For someone like me who could never get into technical articles and books about the Internet, Ralf Hirt's 8W8 Global Space Tribes is as refreshing as a cool breeze in Death Valley.
   
   I found myself thinking I was one of the characters in the novel waking up in EA-RA and sitting down for breakfast wondering what new insights, digital or otherwise, waited to be revealed to me that day. It made me think what different ideas I might have come up with if I had been sitting down at the table with the Golden Skyers.
   
   I read 8W8 on a flight from New York City to LA. I was doing the Okay Fellow trip in reverse. It was almost spooky as when I began looking down and trying to put myself in his position. I began wondering what it was that I was seeing. All of a sudden, I realized that I had always had a nagging feeling that what I had been seeing wasn't really what it appeared to be. By the time we circled in from the ocean into LAX, I had stopped thinking LA as a basin and, instead, I was seeing it as a huge mountain with a large base rising higher than Everest. I remember thinking it was a good thing that the pilot was back in Web 2, because we might have crashed right into that mountain.
   
   Before 8W8, I had never understood the future of the Internet so clearly and what it meant to me personally or the world in particular.
   
   R. Arnold

5 comments about Lhasa: Streets with Memories (Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture).

1. I am struck by the originality of Robert Barnett's approach, as well as the clarity and utter honesty of his voice. LHASA: STREETS WITH MEMORIES is a much needed tool in grappling with the way in which China has absorbed and digested old Tibet and, sadly, the way in which Beijing has re-interpreted Lhasan culture with often appalling results. It's an old tale but told from an utterly fresh viewpoint--a must-read for those who are troubled by China's ongoing stranglehold of Tibetan society.



2. A very confused attempt to be meaningful by a British professor who should have written a magazine article(s) with this material and not a book. Both the writing style and substantive thoughts presented are choppy and obscure.
   
   Not recommended except for those already deeply engrossed with all things touching upon this ancient city of Tibet and who are willing to put up with an opaque and disjointed presentation. (A universe of readers that, I wager, is lightly populated.)
   
   I often disagree with the national editorial reviews that are posted by Amazon, but here the March review by Publishers Weekly has this book dead right.



3. I had no more than a passing interest in Tibet when I was given this book, and I found it absolutely riveting. It gave me a clearer, more immediate sense of the cultural crisis in Tibet than any straightforward, linear history could have done. Robert Barnett begins with the premise that one has to learn how to read any foreign city, and points out that Lhasa, where so much of the text is hidden below the surface, has suffered more than most from foreign misreadings. The book sets out to make Lhasa more legible to foreigners, but what it achieves is deeper and far more important.
   
   Barnett approaches his subject from two perspectives, one intellectual, the other experiential. The main narrative traces the history, mythos and cultural development of the city, and is written from Barnett's current vantage point as a Tibet scholar. This on its own would be an interesting and informative read. But it is the secondary narrative that makes the book so compelling: In hushed italics, Barnett gives us glimpses of his own experiences in Lhasa, first as a hapless tourist who wanders into the middle of the 1987 uprising, and later as a part-time resident teaching at the university. He is careful not to impose his own interpretation on the events, but simply, and generously, shares his observations. The most harrowing of the episodes he recounts come early on, and have to do with his own inability to read Lhasa during a period when a foreigner's misreading could hold serious consequences for the Tibetans involved.
   
   Barnett has an artist's eye for detail, and his writing is lush and vivid. The dual narratives struck me at first as an interesting literary device: the scholar describes the city's development from the ground up, while the foreigner sees the superficial and gradually learns to read what's below the surface. But toward the end of the book, when the two narratives catch up with each other, something extraordinary happens: the scholar succeeds in making Lhasa more legible just as the foreigner observes that the city he has learned to read has in effect already been erased by the Chinese. This realization had a visceral impact on me; the tragic urgency of the situation in Tibet hit me like a blow. "Lhasa: Streets With Memories" is an important book and deserves a wide audience.



4. Tibet and its capital, Lhasa, are among the many places I hardly know. This book is a brief introduction to their history, and the competing narratives non-Tibetans have adopted for interpreting Tibet. It is also a work for those enthralled by the question of what was- staring at a modern city block, you wonder: what was here before? The office building that used to be a park where families would picnic on weekends, the suburb that used to be a swamp.
   
   The book is incomplete- it doesn't try to present modern Tibetans and their narratives. Perhaps because that identity has become confused by assimilation or maybe the author just didn't understand them and knew it.
   
   That said, it's still worth reading as an ode to an ancient city.



5. An unusual book that offers a layered and multi-faceted vision of Lhasa, with great historical depth and an uncommon awareness of the many factors at work. This is not a feel-good narrative, it does not take sides, nor does it presume to tell you what to think. Instead, it combines deep scholarship and detailed knowledge of the political, cultural, social and economic forces behind the tremendous changes in Lhasa since the Chinese arrived - the author is a world-renowned expert on Tibet - with an artist or a poet's sensitivity to what lies beneath appearances. In addition, the writer's perspective is infused with a rare and touching humility, a welcome relief from the rather authoritative or even didactive tone of much travel writing. There is a great deal to be learned from this subtle book and I enjoyed the juxtaposition of personal experience and learned content.

No comments about The Turkish People, Their Social Life, Religious Beliefs and Institutions and Domestic Life.

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.