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

No comments about China Off the Beaten Track.

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   While the 1992 printing will make some info out of date (restaurants for example), this book is one of a kind & the best in its genre.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

4 comments about Insight Guide Shanghai (Insight Guides).

1. This guidebook is impractical to use. It is thick and bulky so makes it impractical to carry around in a purse. Bring a backpack to carry this mini telephone book around.

   The writing is somewhat dry and out of date as well.

   I found the Lonely Planet guide much better for getting around. It can fit in a handbag or pocket




2. If you are looking for a cheap, pocket-size guidebook full of hackneyed cliches about Shanghai, and have the attention span of an MTV- and video game-addled ten-year-old, then by all means, don't buy this book. But if you are looking for something more substantial, the kind of guide that you can sink your teeth into and absorb valuable information about the city's history, society, culture, cuisine, arts and entertainment, then this is the book for you. Having lived in Shanghai for several years, and having spent the past ten years studying the history and culture of the city, I can state definitively that this is by far the most substantial guidebook to Shanghai on the market today. Kudos to editor Francis Dorai for gathering together so many experts to reveal the city's mystique and explain its mysteries.



3. I got the new 2003 Edition, and it is much more compact and light than the previous one. Amazing colorful pictures on every page and impressive narrative. Compared to Frommer's that I also bought for my trip, this one wins hands down. It's a very interesting reading, superbly informative and perfectly up-to-date. I also added Insight Shanghai Fleximap to my order and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of design. So if you are heading to Sanghai or just want to explore the city without leaving your bed, this book is made for you.



4. This book gives ou a nice overview of the region, and incredible specific tips for visiting Shanghai.

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 River of Time: A Memoir of Vietnam.

1. I groped my way through this "memoir" as if reading a never-ending newspaper article--Swain is indeed a journalist by trade. If anything, the book gives a decent summary of the horrors in Southeast Asia (especially the Khmer Rouge) in the mid to late 1970s, complete with gory details but with no new insight. It's as if he dug up all the articles he wrote while covering the war at the time, strung them together, threw in some insincere personal musings and presto! Another product for the latest fad in book publishing: the memoir.

   Swain is shamelessly nostalgic for Cambodia as he first encountered it--as a very young Briton just out of the French Foreign Legion. It was a place where he could frequent prostitutes, wilt away the afternoons in opium dens, and belong to an elite group of white foreign men living in Phonm Penh's best hotel.

   He pays scant attention to the fact that the French Colonial legacy in Southeast Asia is what made it possible for him to frolick with abandon in another people's land and call it "paradise." It's this reputation that still drives countless western male tourists to this poverty-stricken, post-colonial, war-torn country in search of "affordable" pleasures. Swain romanticizes those issues by saying the scene was less "brash" (i.e. tourist-oriented) in the early 70s. His utter lack of CAMBODIAN perspective on the legacies of French Colonialism is disturbing.

   But Swain is a journalist, not a scholar. As is typical with journalists who write historical accounts, such important historical background and perspective is missing and any insight the reader gets is personal. At one point in the book, Swain gives us an insincere justification for why he went back to Cambodia for its darkest hour, and tells us no, it was not for adventure thrill-seeking nor visions of journalistic heroism, but "I don't know." Somehow I don't believe that.




2. I bought this book recently in my hotel's bookstore in Siem Reap, Cambodia during a short holiday there to see Angkor Wat. It is truly a great read ! River of Time has given me a new insight on the appeal of Indo-China and its tragic history. And Jon Swain's writing is powerful and moving.



3. What makes this book worth reading is Swain's account of the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975 to the Khmer Rouge and his confinement in the French Embassy. It's a story that is told in chilling detail in the Oscar-winning movie, "The Killing Fields," in which an actor plays Swain. Swain's true account, especially of the bravery of Cambodian assistant Dith Pran, is possibly the best written account available.
   
   This is a book about the horror and the romance of war and Vietnam was the most horrible and the most romantic of wars. Amidst all the blood, Swain and others had a hell of a good time and only latterly did the tragedy of it all hit home to them. Swain doesn't put on any airs. He was a young and adventurous journalist who enjoyed the atmosphere -- sex, drugs, and rock and roll -- that went along with the war. Swain writes effortlessly and most people will enjoy "River of Time" for its portrayal of a young man and a war.
   
   Smallchief



4. A humorous account of another young 60s counter-culturist who was enlightened as a young man by hookers, opiates and SE Asian narcotics that "opened his eyes" to the "goodness and purity" of the Khmer Rouge, Viet Cong, Ho Chi Minh, Pathet Lao, "French enlightenment" of the Souteast Asian barbarians of the 19th century, and of course last but not least~ the absolute horrendous barbarity of the hegemonic & demonic US regimes that failed to truly understand these great organizations of the 50s thru 70s (yawn...). He waxes on and on about his great acquaintences of Phnom Penh's and Hue's opiate dens as this "illustrious journalist" of the vaulted 4th Estate. Pretty pathetic writing overall as I waded through all the despot worshipping until it just got way to sycophantical. Saloth Sar, Ta Mok, Ieng Sary and General Giap would have loved to have Mr Swain nearby at nap time ........ :) If you loved John Kerry's tired anti-Vietnam War fantasies, you will love Mr Swain's opiate dreams book immensely!!



5. Jon's autobiographical account of his five years in Indo-China covers the critical climax of the Cold War in SE Asia, the fall of Phnom Penh. Recounting the horrors of the Khmer Rouge forced evacuation of Phnom Penh amd the desperate struggle of refuges who sought sanctuary in the French Embassy. The book is well paced and straight forward. A rewarding book on a subject that has all but been forgotten by all except the victims of the wars in IndoChina.

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.

1 comments about We're Riding on a Caravan.

1. In "We're Riding on a Caravan", readers are introduced to the Silk Road, an important trading route that connected Asia and Europe centuries ago. It tells the readers about the caravan journey of a family as they make this yearlong trip over the Chinese leg of the trip. We see how they began in Xi'an, stopped in the cities in Lanzhou and Dunhuang, rested in Hami, traded in Turpan, and finally arrived in Kashgar where they sell their remaining silk at the market before setting out on the return journey home. The trip is then presented on an illustrated map in the endnotes, giving readers a better idea of the distances between the stops on the journey.
   
   In addition to the map, the traditional story of how silk was discovered is recounted in the endnotes. It also devotes a couple pages to the history of the Silk Road, which should be useful to readers who might not have been introduced to the subject in school yet. For readers who are uncertain about pronunciation of the Chinese names, the endnotes offer a pronunciation guide as well as a paragraph or so of information about each location. While the endnotes are of the same high quality as in the other books, there seems to be fewer pages of them than in other books published by Barefoot Books I have read.
   
   This book is another well written one by Laurie Krebs. Each spread of pages includes a pair of rhyming couplets, followed by the repeating refrain "We're riding on a caravan, a bumpy, humpy caravan. We're riding on a caravan to places far away." The illustrations are also quite nice, bright and colorful, with some whimsical touches such as curls in the clouds. Overall, this is an excellent book on the topic for young readers, demonstrating the wide scope of the trading route and its international impact, especially in the market of Kashgar. However, one thing to keep in mind is that "We're Riding on a Caravan" might be a little too advanced for some readers. While other books by this author deal with concepts such as counting and days of the week ("We're Going on Safari", "We're Sailing to Galapagos"), this one has more text and a slightly more complicated plot as the family travels along the Silk Road. If kids have enjoyed Laurie Krebs books about foreign locations ("Off We Go To Mexico", "We're Sailing Down the Nile") they will probably have little trouble graduating up to "We're Riding on a Caravan."