No comments about China (Roop, Peter. Visit to.).

No comments about Illustrated Catalog of Chinese Coins, Vol. 1: Gold, Silver, Nickel and Aluminum (Illustrated Catalog of Chinese Coins).

1 comments about Coming Home to China (Posthumanities).

1. Yi-Fu Tuan is a towering figure in cultural geography -- so towering that he rises above the discipline's ceiling and is visible and inspiring as a writer/philosopher to a far broader audience of academics and "lay" readers. You certainly don't need to be a geographer to admire this book for its constant stream of observations and commentary on modern China reflecting Tuan's distinctive sensibility and preoccupations with home and place. Dr. Tuan wrote the book shortly after returning to Wisconsin from his visit to China, which he had not visited in over 60 years. The work is immediate and fresh, not re-worked into thick academic prose. It's a real gift for fans of Dr. Tuan.

2 comments about A Walk in the Sky: Climbing Hidden Park.

1. Since I know the author I am of course biased in his favor. But as he makes (favorable) mention of me in the book that gives him top rating of 5 stars.
   
   Actually, it's a darn fine book. I've been reading mountaineering literature for quite some time now and am struck by evolution of style over the years. Books of the 1920s and 30s now seem "detached." We learn from them what people DID, but not a lot about who the people WERE. (Tilman is a great and welcome exception.) Through his humor--often self-deprecating--Clinch's story makes it plain that mountaineers can accomplish great things while still enjoying themselves. Probably as a reflection of what the publishers know will sell, more recent books (and especially TV movies and the like) place so much emphasis on danger, harum-scarum and disaster that a general reader (who can't see between the lines) must get a very peculiar slant on climbing.
   
   Read it!



2. It was refreshing to read a good story of the first ascent of Hidden Peak in 1958. This was before the Himalayas were deluged by eco-tourists and before numerous sensationalist accounts of conquest written or filmed. Here is a story of some American mountaineers scraping together an expedition to enjyoy a climb of an 8,000 meter peak. How much better can it get? Perhaps the author "sanitized" the account since it is devoid of personality and ego conflicts. Everyone in the book is a happy camper: sahibs, HAPs and porters.

3 comments about Climbing Everest: A Meditation on Mountaineering and the Spirit of Adventure.

1. Rembrandt often did self-portraits, and a few of his critics called him vain. My book "Climbing Everest" is a type of self-portrait. It is a book about progression, how each of us moves upward through the various storms and camps of life. We each try to gain the next height, the next level of awareness or spiritual insight. The fact that I know my subject, climbing, very well is almost incidental to the real meanings of the book which are to be found somewhat between the lines. As with Everest, this book will require a little effort. You will have to be the measure of the task. I write these words in the spirit of encouragement. Give the book a chance, find a place to quietly and honestly and truly read and feel it, absorb its messages, and see if it doesn't speak of life itself. It will speak of the struggles required of us and the joys. Life, like Everest, is at once both beautiful and terrible, rewarding and painful. This is a book about climbing, yes, but it is more a book about the inner soul and aspiring to the high realms of appreciation, friendship, art, strength, love, and deeper meanings. Everest is simply one of an infinite number of places the soul and spirit seek and need to attain. -- Pat Ament



2. Everest, that noble word derives its meaning not from the height it represents nor the atmosphere. It has the meaning derived from the great souls that have been a part of it and make it a part of theirselves. The journey through a thousand words into the heart of Everest can never be more enjoyable and dynamic and challenging and sometimes surprisingly and ironically funny than when accompanied with Pat Ament's book: Climbing Everest.
   The challenges of everest are their in everyones life, however the Team spirit, vision and direction and guidance make any Everest in ones life a successful venture. Whether you are an armchair Philosopher or an avid mountaineer you would love the way the lines lead you to the heart and heights of the Himalayas and bring you back with new power and grace in a different level of awareness back to where you belong. Oh Everest, how I wish I am Mallory's companion or Robert Frost,s poem..may be I am, for I am lost totally in the laps of Himalayas and can never descend.



3. (...) It is not hard to understand why someone who made it to the top would want to write about the trek and all that entailed. Pat Ament is one of many mountaineers to climb Everest and return from the summit to write about it. His book is about the thrills of climbing Everest and the general mentality of all successful mountaineers.
   To get right down to it, I honestly didn't like the book and didn't get a whole lot out of reading it. In the book Climbing Everest the author Ament writes more about the feelings that his memories of the climb invoke as he is sitting down to write about his adventure and less about the actual climb and the physical toll it took on him. He says things like "The Everest climber comes back to the regular world, returns home, and then in his manner, built into him, is a bearing, a small shiver, something fixed, as though he never will cease to shake in the dark airspace of a tent" (...). This in my opinion makes the book a little hard to read when you can hardly understand what the man is really talking about. This also makes it a little difficult to comprehend what the author is trying to get across to his readers. Ament might be doing this and not even realize what he is doing. (...) Although Ament did not write the kind of book I was expecting to read, I think that the book was well written. Personally I told you that I really didn't like it, but it was a well written book. He tells us some of the feelings that you might experience when on the mountain or while you are climbing it. He also tells some interesting facts about how people of all skill levels can climb a mountain.
   So in a sense he is saying that with the right preparation you can overcome Everest no matter what class mountaineer that you are.
   He also speaks of some of the people he has climbed with over the years . An important fact that Ament put in the book was when Chomolungma, the name given the mountain by Tibetans, was renamed Everest after the surveyor-General of India, Sir George Everest, in 1865, it was about 56 years before actual climbers(or at least any of which we know) would go up onto the mountain and map what might be learned of themselves. And another very important statement that Ament quoted "The mountains give, the mountains take" (...). This statement is important to me in the fact that he is saying that you climb at your own risk, and you just hope that on the trip no one gets injured or looses his or her lives. I think this statement refers more to the fact that there is very little control on the mountain. It doesn't matter to the mountain who's climbing - the climber might get lucky and have great climbing weather or the climber could get killed by an avalanche. You can't predict what the climb will be like because it's all up to the mountain.
   Ament's Climbing Everest was not what I expected. It had some good qualities - some history about the peak and it's references to Shakespeare as well as the encouragement he offered his readers who might be interested in climbing Everest - but overall, the book was not a very good one. I think Ament was writing more for himself than for his audience because he included to many feelings and not enough descriptions about his experiences as he strove to reach the top of Everest. If you were to judge the book by it's cover, like I did, and use just the title to choose the book, I think you would be disappointed by the story that came after the cover. Ament wanted to reflect on his memories of the climb and the emotions that he felt as he was remembering instead of looking back on the adventure he had as he ascended Mt. Everest. The general public is more interested in Ament's actions than in his feeling's and I think that he had catered more to that sentiment, the book would have been much more interesting to read.

No comments about Fourteen Months in Canton.

No comments about A Record of Buddhist Monasteries in Lo-Yang (Princeton Library of Asian Translations).

2 comments about Lonely Planet Best of Beijing (Lonely Planet Encounter Series).

1. Perhaps I have to chalk it up to my nearly-fifty-year-old eyes, but this guidebook is virtually impossible to use without a magnifying glass. Every time I read a review that harps point size I usually take it with the proverbial grain of salt, but this one really is very difficult to use. The maps of Beijing are even worse than the text, as the captions are printed in colors that do not stand out from the background. I thought this would be a nice little pocketbook to carry, that would fulfill both guidebook and map requirements, but in the latter case, it just isn't useful at all!
   The guidebook itself is pretty concise, however, so that is a redeeming factor. A lot of the info seems to be imported from the LP China volume. I would just get that, plus a real map of Beijing. (And I have found that the Insight map of Beijing does not have any captions in Chinese characters. Maybe it was an older edition? I would think that is requisite for a city map to be at all useful!)



2. Why beware? Well, Beijing is undergoing massive reconstruction in advance of the 2008 Olympics. I went to one location this guide mentioned, hoping to find the "Cool World CD Store" and instead found an open construction lot.
   
   Snap.
   
   Fortunately, the big places - The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, etc. - are still there, so you shouldn't miss those. The maps are superior and were the things I'd refer to most frequently there. They're strategically located on the endflaps, not buried in the pages of the book. If I ever go to Beijing again, I'll have this little travel bible by my side, you can be assured of that!

No comments about South China Map (China).

No comments about Mountain in Tibet: The Search for Mount Kailas and the Sources of the Great River of Asia.