Fool
I enjoyed “Writing Tools” more but there was some good basic practical advice in the work. The strongest part of the work, I felt, was the chapter on “Sentencing,” which explored some of the different sentence structures that work well and what their advantages and disadvantages are. The chapter on “Grace” and “Shapely Thoughts” also had some useful nuggets.
My favorite book this year and one of the best I've ever read. Perhaps it had a more powerful effect on me since I spent several months in the archives in China reading the reports of the Communist treason elimination bureau, but this work brilliantly captures the essence of the mad logic of a Communist purge.
Tony Judt has a great essay about Arthur Koestler and his importance found as the first chapter in part one, in his collection “Reappraisals” which I found very informative.
Heard about this author on NPR and became interested in this strange genre of early aftermath of war Germany mystery and thriller literature. I couldn't get the more famous Berlin Noir series by the author at any local bookstores so gave this one a try.
I wanted to quit about half way through. The Gunther character is so painfully implausible.
The necessity to have the dry sarcasm in almost every exchange is what we might expect from a detective in a Law & Order episode or Han Solo, but seemed so bizarre for a character of Gunther's background.
I also got tired of him reminding the reader (via dialog with every character he meets) how the former Waffen-SS detective is not an anti-Semite and disapproved of the many atrocities of National Socialism. It was as if the character felt obligated to stop the action and turn apologetically to the reader periodically.
The book is well written and well researched, but most of the characters felt like they belonged in 1920s Chicago instead of 1945 Germany. The plot of this one wandered and the final setup so suddenly unraveled and implausibly assembled that I feel no compulsion to read any more of Kerr's Gunther works.
This book works best for writers of fiction and short journalistic pieces, but as a PhD student about to begin writing up his dissertation, I found plenty of “tools” worth keeping in mind as I write.
Each section is short, and each part organized well under the type of “tool” for writing the author has described. There are great examples, from a wide range of source texts, and nice check sheet at the back to refer back to as one writes.
These are a series of three Harvard lectures Fogel gave that have been published. The first of them is an excellent overview of Sino-Japanese relations from the Han dynasty to the late 19th century.
I very much like Fogel's conception of the “Sinosphere” as a replacement for the old “Chinese world order” and the more flexible order it suggests. I suspect the term will take off and get used in other scholarship.
The second essay feels a bit out of place but this often happens in the case of these lectures-turned-book projects. It is more of a report on Fogel's progress on his research into the 1862 voyage of the Senzaimaru, and spends most of its time discussing the Dutch side of his archival research.
The third essay, on the Japanese community in Shanghai from the 1860s until the 1890s will be of great interest to anyone studying Sino-Japanese relations in the second half of the century or interested in the many domains of Japanese activity in Shanghai life in the late-19th century.
For anyone who is doing research on the history of crucial turnover period of the late civil war to early 1950s in China, then this is an important city study that provides a lot of rich local detail and findings based on a variety of great archives. It also is a great example of a turnover which involves CCP cadres from Shandong, mostly rural Luzhongnan, in a mid-sized city.
There is not too much new here, and the arguments advanced are neither terribly original or the writing inspiring. There is an emphasis in the introduction of the book on political ritual and transformation of political culture, but the book seems to stray considerably from this and resemble much more closely a description of Hangzhou's experience of some of the important events that most books on China during the period address: the disciplined nature of troops when taking over the city, the gradual squeeze, the suppression of counterrevolutionaries, the three antis, the five antis, and the new three antis, with a chapter on cultural reforms and women cadres thrown in which both feel a bit detached.
It was, however, all interesting material and looks solid in terms of content and research.
The diary is relatively short but a fascinating look into the experiences of one educated Icelandic priest. His observations of the North African pirates, daily life in North Africa of of peoples and places on his journey back to Denmark and then his home islands often surprise.
Glad this important Icelandic historical document is now available in English translation.
Interesting read. The book is somewhat split in half. Half of it tries to use the life of the protagonist as a way to explore the triggers of a “run” of innovations, while the final portion focus, in a much more fragmented and less thorough way on his relationship to questions of faith, politics, and the US. It felt a little hurried and stretched in the second half and too much time was spent on trying to laud Priestley's important role, rather than dig deeper into some of the encounters and issues involved.
Does a good job of selecting some essays that bring out the major themes of Teilhard's mysticism. This is useful for someone who wants to get a grip on his ideas since his works can get extremely repetitive while not always staying consistent in vocabulary and explanation of the central ideas. With some short introductory comments in each section, I felt like this was a good way to get the general overview of the main ideas.
The translation from French comes across as clean but the style and approach of the original assumes a bit too much from a non-French audience in places. If you are looking for a general work on Jesuits, look elsewhere, but if you are interested in a fresh take on some of the most important Jesuit minds of the past few centuries these chapters are great to consult.
Interesting treatment of several major travel classics and especially the evolution of certain techniques of narrative and their contribution to the development of the novel. Especially thought the chapters on Mandeville and Marco Polo to be informative, as well as passages on Wonders of the East and Friar William.
A central question in the various essays of the book is “When did Japan/China become Japan/China” - Some really great scholars, including the editor Fogel, Eiko Ikegami, William C. Kirby, David L. Howell, Peter Perdue etc. all offer their thoughts and bring their years of research to their responses.
Another soldier McLogan's memoir “Boy Soldier: Coming of Age During World War II” also has two chapters on life in the same 63rd Infantry Regiment (6th Infantry Division) in Kunsan, South Korea and is a good book for comparison. Ottoboni's memoir is hands down, much better. His recollections of his days stationed in Kunsan are filled with much greater personal detail, including frequent extended quotations from his letters of the time, and thus offers the reader with a much richer range of material from the personal experiences of a single soldier.
Unfortunately from the perspective of someone interested in the history of Korean society, Ottoboni had very little interaction with Koreans and observed very little of what was going on in the Korea between the wars. This memoir does provide, however, the reader with a lot of anecdotes that show the incredibly poor state of supply for US troops stationed in Korea from 1947-1948 (when Ottoboni was there) and for some of the mistreatment of Koreans by US soldiers.
Memoir of McLogan. Includes a chapter on his postwar assignment to Korea. There are some interesting moments throughout. Unfortunately, McLogan includes a lot of general historical narrative from other sources so that the reader will get more of a macroscopic picture of what is going on. While some readers unfamiliar with Korea or its history may be interested, this means that we are left with relatively little in the way of his own experiences and anecdotes, especially in the postwar chapters I was most interested in. Given how hard it is to find good accounts of Korea from 1945-1950, it was thus somewhat of a disappointment.
Some of my favorite quotes from the work.
“I don't think they appreciated us burning the rice to keep war, but then, we did get rid of the Japanese overlords so their standard of living had to improve.”
“One day we went down to the town and practiced village fighting maneuvers, much to the consternation of the villagers.”
“I think it was the combination of kimchi and fecal matter which made the town smell so rank.” (Kunsan)
Gangsters and Revolutionaries: The Jakarta People's Militia and the Indonesian Revolution, 1945-1949
Somewhat dry and mostly political narrative of the Indonesian Revolution. Surprising that, given the detailed topic, there was a lot less focus on specific groups and people, or even more general abstract analysis of the “gangsters” (this term is not sufficiently problematized) or their relationship to the revolutionaries.
However, given there is not a whole lot on this topic out there, as far as I know, it was still informative to someone such as myself who has much to learn about this particular troubling period of postcolonial Indonesia.
This book is essentially a collection of anecdotes about the last Manchu emperor Puyi by his last wife Li Shuxian. Though it is filled with tempting photographs depicting his life as emperor and later Japanese puppet, the text mainly covers his final years in the 1960s.
It is difficult to gauge how much we are to trust the contents. It is easily apparent that Puyi, and his wife, became important vehicles of Communist propaganda after he was released from Fushun prison and developed ties to Zhou Enlai. She rarely strays from depictions of him as a thoroughly reformed, if scatterbrained, lover of China's new liberation. The only time she contradicts this is in her depiction of him as a daring voice willing to stand up for his friends when they came under attack during the cultural revolution. She offers almost unbelievable stories of his complete inability to perform simple daily tasks. These are difficult to buy since she met him years after his long imprisonment.
The book had enough interesting anecdotes to make a few hours in the airport pass, and it is interesting to find out how much he was coddled by Communist government officials in his final years and used as an ideal reformed citizen of the New China. However, unsurprisingly given the editor and origins of the work, the book seems rather lazily compiled and doesn't try much to explore more critically some of the more issues involved in his life.
Written by and mostly for those who appreciate a clear legal approach, this summarizes the case against Knut Hamsun and evaluates the central claims that were key to the guilty verdict reached against him, especially on whether or not Hamsun was indeed a member of NS in wartime.
The book argues that Hamsun's activities were without a doubt treasonous and he could have been prosecuted under any number of criminal treason charges, but the charges and ruling against him in civil proceedings based on his NS membership were flawed, and the medical ruling of his weakened intellect is dubious.
A wonderful anti-nationalist “mythbuster” book which deconstructs every major myth of the Norwegian nationalist historical narrative while promoting a view of history based on the idea of “The world in Norway and Norway in the world.”
I was particularly fond of the sections on Danish rule in Norway and the “1800s battle for Norway's soul.”
The efforts of this book mirror attempts being made by historians all over the world to confront nationalist narratives.
Will be enjoyed most by those familiar with the intellectuals being discussed in the review essays offered in the first half. Also, those unfamiliar with the review essay style of the New York Review of Books may find the format unusual.
Judt can be a harsh critic, and sometimes simply unkind. While I'm no fan of the target, his essay on Althusser came across as just plain bitter and Judt just seemed to be pouring out his disdain for the post-Marxists around him.
However his amazing depth of knowledge about the history and especially intellectual history of 20th century Europe shows in every review. What I like best about Judt is that, while he is a progressive and highly political writer, he has absolutely no patience for the sympathy for the communist experiment that was exhibited by several generations of 20th century intellectuals.
Jewish intellectuals and critiques of Israel get very strong showings, understandable given Judt's own personal background, but there are also fascinating review essays that cover Romania, Belgium, England, Europe vs. US, and the question of the EU.
I'm not entirely sure if the overly dramatic and emotional way in which this book was presented is more due to the narrator or the author and the selections chosen by the author. Either way I was disappointed with this book.
It addresses an interesting and important topic and while I generally have no objections to narrative histories which make extensive use of contemporary sources to help tell the story, the effect here was counter productive. In the case of the worst chapters, it seems the author completely gave up any attempt at analysis or explanation, threw up hands in despair and gave the reader a long string of inflammatory articles from newspapers of the time designed to spark the appropriate feelings of disgust.
The universal discrimination, violent acts of terror, and reprehensible views held by many of the Southern protagonists all deserve mention and quotation, but the assemblage of characters and their portrayal came across in such a polarizing and unbalanced way this book cannot but anger and disgust anyone who might have some sympathies for the predicament of defeated southerners in the aftermath of the civil war. The result may unfortunately lead to the opposite of the desired effect: many people for whom a book of this topic would be an ideal read will be completely put off not only this work but the whole topic.
Another frustrating aspect of this book was that less than half of the book focuses on the terror itself. We get long, rambling, and often completely irrelevant looks at the lives and loves of the “heroes” of the story, using valuable space in the book that might have been better dedicated to understanding the character of southern society, economy, and the origins and rise of a culture of discrimination and violence.