Fool

Incredibly readable and lucid. Wonderful to see how it engages with mainstream ethical philosophy in the US while explaining and contrasting it with his own approach.

Fantastic and diverse collection.

Professor 内田 is probably the best scholar in Japan on wartime Shanxi province and it helps that he has great access to archival sources from his many trips there. In his several books he covers all kinds of social issues from wartime Shanxi that may not dazzle in the headlines but on closer examination tackle really important themes from the war.

Had high hopes for this. Was told to expect something along lines of Umberto Eco but alas it fell far short of his mastery. Learned a lot about medieval medicine but the plot was just not as engaging and the background for the book just not as alive in the work as it could have been given its huge scale.

Critics of human rights discourse and new approaches to the history of human rights will probably see this work as an example of the kind of optimistic picture that they are working to deconstruct but from a normative perspective, the term “justice cascade” is useful as a tool and approach. The trick will be to combine this with some of the lessons of the critical scholarship.

This book is getting a bit long in the tooth now as a lot of Taiwanese scholarship has been published on the 2/28 incident since it came out. It is remarkable for its unusual attempt to present the various arguments in a “balanced” way. The effect ultimately didn't really work out that way however.

I felt there was considerably more coverage of Taiwanese violence against mainlanders in the early stages of the incident than on the much larger scale of violence by the Chinese military in the oppression of the incident. Since more recent descriptions usually err on the opposite side however, this can complement other accounts.

I am not persuaded by their argument about the low number of security forces on the island compared to the Japanese being a reason for the scale of the incident. They clump Japanese military and security forces together and compare these numbers to security plus military forces of the Chinese. What they don't mention is that the numbers of police/gendarmerie remains almost constant into the postwar. Obviously if there had been more soldiers in Taiwan, the uprising may have been put down more quickly but since some of the worst violence by Chinese forces was carried out by Peng's forces already in Taiwan, it is not clear that it would have resulted in fewer deaths or less oppression.

Great book for anyone living in Singapore who wants a nice comprehensive history of the Botanic Gardens but which also touches on its connection to the broader history of its connection to green policies in Singapore. Well researched and the footnotes offer a wealth of material primary and secondary for anyone interested to follow up on.

There is excellent tying of this work to the broader historiography and promising pushes in the direction of linking the story of the botanic gardens to the larger networks of gardens and science in empire but was more limited in following through on this when the chapters dove into the empirical section. The book was more narrative than analytic, more of a survey than an interpretative and argumentative academic work.

Very detailed introduction and notes.

Short but useful.

Fantastically concise. Read this along with two other more detailed grammar books on French but found this one to hit just the right balance of useful vs. comprehensive. Great range of example sentences for each lesson.