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A Year Without “Made in China”: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy (Hardcover)

by Sara Bongiorni (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Journalist Bongiorni, on a post-Christmas day mired deep in plastic toys and electronics equipment, makes up her mind to live for a year without buying any products made in China, a decision spurred less by notions of idealism or fair trade-though she does note troubling statistics on job loss and trade deficits-than simply “to see if it can be done.” In this more personal vein, Bongiorni tells often funny, occasionally humiliating stories centering around her difficulty procuring sneakers, sunglasses, DVD players and toys for two young children and a skeptical husband. With little insight into global economics or China’s manufacturing practices, readers may question the point of singling out China when cheap, sweatshop-produced products from other countries are fair game (though Bongiorni cheerfully admits the flaws in her project, she doesn’t consider fixing them). Still, Bongiorni is a graceful, self-deprecating writer, and her comic adventures in self-imposed inconvenience cast an interesting sideways glance at the personal effects of globalism, even if it doesn’t easily connect to the bigger picture.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
Journalist Bongiorni, on a post-Christmas day mired deep in plastic toys and electronics equipment, makes up her mind to live for a year without buying any products made in China, a decision spurred less by notions of idealism or fair trade-though she does note troubling statistics on job loss and trade deficits-than simply “to see if it can be done.” In this more personal vein, Bongiorni tells often funny, occasionally humiliating stories centering around her difficulty procuring sneakers, sunglasses, DVD players and toys for two young children and a skeptical husband. With little insight into global economics or China’s manufacturing practices, readers may question the point of singling out China when cheap, sweatshop-produced products from other countries are fair game (though Bongiorni cheerfully admits the flaws in her project, she doesn’t consider fixing them). Still, Bongiorni is a graceful, self-deprecating writer, and her comic adventures in self-imposed inconvenience cast an interesting sideways glance at the personal effects of globalism, even if it doesn’t easily connect to the bigger picture.(July)  (Publishers Weekly, August 6, 2007)

“a wry look at the ingenuity it takes to shun the planet’s fastest-growing economy.” (Bloomberg News)

“The West’s dependence on Chinese exports was neatly summed up”  (The Telegraph, Sunday 12th August 2007)

“What the year-long experiment did achieve, was to switch on Bongiorni as a consumer and make her alive to the complexities and shifting power of the international economy. (Financial Times, Saturday 25th August)

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Mao: The Unknown Story (Hardcover)

by Jung Chang (Author), Jon Halliday (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
In the epilogue to her biography of Mao Tse-tung, Jung Chang and her husband and cowriter Jon Halliday lament that, “Today, Mao’s portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital.” For Chang, author of Wild Swans, this fact is an affront, not just to history, but to decency. Mao: The Unknown Story does not contain a formal dedication, but it is clear that Chang is writing to honor the millions of Chinese who fell victim to Mao’s drive for absolute power in his 50-plus-year struggle to dominate China and the 20th-century political landscape. From the outset, Chang and Halliday are determined to shatter the “myth” of Mao, and they succeed with the force, not just of moral outrage, but of facts. The result is a book, more indictment than portrait, that paints Mao as a brutal totalitarian, a thug, who unleashed Stalin-like purges of millions with relish and without compunction, all for his personal gain. Through the authors’ unrelenting lens even his would-be heroism as the leader of the Long March and father of modern China is exposed as reckless opportunism, subjecting his charges to months of unnecessary hardship in order to maintain the upper hand over his rival, Chang Kuo-tao, an experienced military commander.

Using exhaustive research in archives all over the world, Chang and Halliday recast Mao’s ascent to power and subsequent grip on China in the context of global events. Sino-Soviet relations, the strengths and weakness of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese invasion of China, World War II, the Korean War, the disastrous Great Leap Forward, the vicious Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, Nixon’s visit, and the constant, unending purges all, understandably, provide the backdrop for Mao’s unscrupulous but invincible political maneuverings and betrayals. No one escaped unharmed. Rivals, families, peasants, city dwellers, soldiers, and lifelong allies such as Chou En-lai were all sacrificed to Mao’s ambition and paranoia. Appropriately, the authors’ consciences are appalled. Their biggest fear is that Mao will escape the global condemnation and infamy he deserves. Their astonishing book will go a long way to ensure that the pendulum of history will adjust itself accordingly. –Silvana Tropea

10 Second Interview: A Few Words with Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Q: From idea to finished book, how long did Mao: The Unknown Story take to research and write?
A: Over a decade.

Q: What was your writing process like? How did you two collaborate on this project?
A: The research shook itself out by language. Jung did all the Chinese-language research, and Jon did the other languages, of which Russian was the most important, as Mao had a long-term intimate relationship with Stalin. After our research trips around the world, we would work in our separate studies in London. We would then rendezvous at lunch to exchange discoveries.

Q: Do you have any thoughts about how the book is, or will be received in China? Did that play a part in your writing of the book?
A: The book is banned in China, because the current Communist regime is fiercely perpetuating the myth of Mao. Today Mao’s portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, and the regime declares itself to be Mao’s heir. The government blocked the distribution of an issue of The Far Eastern Economic Review, and told the magazine’s owners, Dow Jones, that this was because that issue contained a review of our book. The regime also tore the review of our book out of The Economist magazine that was going to (very restricted) newsstands. We are not surprised that the book is banned. The regime’s attitude had no influence on how we wrote the book. We hope many copies will find their way into China.

Q: What is the one thing you hope readers get from your book?
A: Mao was responsible for the deaths of well over 70 million Chinese in peacetime, and he was bent on dominating the world. As China is today emerging as an economic and military power, the world can never regard it as a benign force unless Beijing rejects Mao and all his legacies. We hope our book will help push China in this direction by telling the truth about Mao.

Breakdown of a BIG Book: 5 Things You’ll Learn from Mao: The Unknown Story

1. Mao became a Communist at the age of 27 for purely pragmatic reasons: a job and income from the Russians.

2. Far from organizing the Long March in 1934, Mao was nearly left behind by his colleagues who could not stand him and had tried to oust him several times. The aim of the March was to link up with Russia to get arms. The Reds survived the March because Chiang Kai-shek let them, in a secret horse-trade for his son and heir, whom Stalin was holding hostage in Russia.

3. Mao grew opium on a large scale.

4. After he conquered China, Mao’s over-riding goal was to become a superpower and dominate the world: “Control the Earth,” as he put it.

5. Mao caused the greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear and arms industries: 38 million people were starved and slave-driven to death in 1958-61. Mao knew exactly what was happening, saying: “half of China may well have to die.”

From Publishers Weekly
Jung Chang, author of the award-winning Wild Swans, grew up during the Cultural Revolution; Halliday is a research fellow at King’s College, University of London. They join forces in this sweeping but flawed biography, which aims to uncover Mao’s further cruelties (beyond those commonly known) by debunking claims made by the Communist Party in his service. For example, the authors argue that, far from Mao’s humble peasant background shaping his sympathies for the downtrodden, he actually ruthlessly exploited the peasants’ resources when he was based in regions such as Yenan, and cared about peasants only when it suited his political agenda. And far from having founded the Chinese Communist Party, the authors argue, Mao was merely at the right place at the right time. Importantly, the book argues that in most instances Mao was able to hold on to power thanks to his adroitness in appealing to and manipulating powerful allies and foes, such as Stalin and later Nixon; furthermore, almost every aspect of his career was motivated by a preternatural thirst for personal power, rather than political vision. Some of the book’s claims rely on interviews and on primary material (such as the anguished letters Mao’s second wife wrote after he abandoned her), though the book’s use of sources is sometimes incompletely documented and at times heavy-handed (for example, using a school essay the young Mao wrote to show his lifelong ruthlessness). Illus., maps. (Oct. 21)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future — and the Challenge for America (Hardcover)

by James Kynge (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, binding its billion-plus population more tightly to the global economic system, the Asian giant’s prodigious appetite for food, technology and natural resources has dramatically accelerated profound changes already well underway across the planet. Kynge, the Financial Times’s former Beijing bureau chief, makes the voracious “appetites” of the new China his constant concern, as he uncovers the sources of and limitations on the giant country’s epochal growth. Beginning with a scene in Germany’s postindustrial Ruhr-where a steel mill is sold, deconstructed and shipped more than 5,000 miles for reassembly near the banks of the Yangtze River-Kynge assesses the socioeconomic transformations of China’s low “Industrial Revolution-era” labor costs and modern production technology at home and abroad. But for all its world-shaking potential, notes Kynge, “China’s endowments are deeply lopsided.” Key weaknesses-such as a shortage of arable land, serious environmental devastation and pollution, systemic corruption and a dearth of resources-are conversely helping to ensure that China will have to manage its growing hegemony in a symbiotic manner with partners on the economic and geopolitical playing fields. Despite the subtitle, and a chapter devoted to China’s acquisition of U.S. technologies, Kynge focuses at least as much on China’s significance for Western Europe. Overall, Kynge’s crisp assessment of the dynamics involved is both authoritative and eye-opening. (Sept. 27)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist 
A former bureau chief of the Financial Times in Beijing, Kynge demonstrates how China’s thirst for jobs, raw materials, energy, and new markets–and its export of goods, workers, and investments–will dramatically reshape world trade and politics. China’s appetite, though unpremeditated and inarticulate, has become a source of major change in the world. Napoleon said, “Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.” In the early days of the twenty-first century, China has started shaking the world with its prowess in manufacturing. Not all is rosy, however, because China has serious problems with its environmental resources, severe pollution, and institutionalized corruption within the government, the legal system, the police force, and the media. The question Kynge offers answers to is how the world will cope with China’s extremes of both strength and weakness. Gail Whitcomb
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Peony in Love: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Lisa See (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Set in 17th-century China, See’s fifth novel is a coming-of-age story, a ghost story, a family saga and a work of musical and social history. As Peony, the 15-year-old daughter of the wealthy Chen family, approaches an arranged marriage, she commits an unthinkable breach of etiquette when she accidentally comes upon a man who has entered the family garden. Unusually for a girl of her time, Peony has been educated and revels in studying The Peony Pavilion, a real opera published in 1598, as the repercussions of the meeting unfold. The novel’s plot mirrors that of the opera, and eternal themes abound: an intelligent girl chafing against the restrictions of expected behavior; fiction’s educative powers; the rocky path of love between lovers and in families. It figures into the plot that generations of young Chinese women, known as the lovesick maidens, became obsessed with The Peony Pavilion, and, in a Werther-like passion, many starved themselves to death. See (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, etc.) offers meticulous depiction of women’s roles in Qing and Ming dynasty China (including horrifying foot-binding scenes) and vivid descriptions of daily Qing life, festivals and rituals. Peony’s vibrant voice, perfectly pitched between the novel’s historical and passionate depths, carries her story beautifully-in life and afterlife. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post’s Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Nicholas Delbanco

Lisa See’s new novel continues her exploration of the Chinese past. Peony in Love is in no formal sense related to her bestselling Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, or her memoir On Gold Mountain, but it profits from the same sensibility and comes from the same pen. This book has a three-part structure (”In the Garden,” “Roaming with the Wind,” and “Under the Plum Tree”) and is deeply rooted in such texts as Tang Xianzu’s opera “The Peony Pavilion,” first produced and published in 1598. Importantly, too, it derives from The Three Wives Commentary of 1694, “the first book of its kind to have been published anywhere in the world to have been written by women — three wives, no less.” As historical fiction, Peony in Love attempts — almost entirely successfully — to immerse the reader in a world both strange and distant; whereas Snow Flower dealt with 19th-century China, the action of this book transpires two centuries before.

See’s love story takes as its narrator a girl dead at 16 and doomed to be a “hungry ghost” for decades until she can be “transformed into an ancestor.” That narrator, young Peony, is a beguiling mix of innocence and experience; we watch her both as the pampered and studious daughter of a wealthy family and as a starveling wisp of air who cannot negotiate corners and must avoid mirrors and swords. There’s a prodigious amount of information here digested and conveyed.

“I thought of the gifts my father would send with the pieces of pig,” Peony tells us, “sprigs of artemisia to expel evil influences before my arrival, pomegranates to symbolize my fertility, jujubes because the word sounded like having children quickly, and the seven grains, because the character for kernel was identical in writing and sound to offspring.” This comes as preparation for marriage. Peony dies before that ceremony can be consummated, however, and here is part of how — still conscious, still serving as our narrator — she is prepared for death: “Mama placed a thin sliver of jade in my mouth to safeguard my body.

Second Aunt tucked coins and rice in my pockets so I might soothe the rabid dogs I’d meet on my way to the afterworld. Third Aunt covered my face with a thin piece of white silk. Fourth Aunt tied colored string around my waist to prevent me from carrying away any of our family’s children and around my feet to restrain my body from leaping about should I be tormented by evil spirits on my journey.”

That journey does seem strange. These characters cannot bear too much scrutiny; it’s never clear, for example, why the poet Wu Ren fails to declare himself to her on their “three nights of love.” That the girl should not know him makes sense; she’s been protected all her life and forbidden to meet men. But he’s her father’s chess-playing companion, familiar with the great Chen house, and would know by her dress and deportment that she’s his bride-to-be. Also, the behavior of the 9-year-old Tan Ze, who becomes Wu’s second wife, is capricious to the point of caricature.

The last line of the first paragraph of the book, though true enough, strikes a discordant note, “It was going to be amazing,” and often there’s a romantic breathiness to the prose that feels like poor translation: “Grandmother laughed. The sound was so foreign that it jarred me from my tragic circumstances. I turned to her and her face practically danced with mirth and mischievousness. I had never seen that before, but I was too heartbroken to be hurt by that old woman’s amusement at my desperate circumstances.”

Finally, there can be inadvertent humor in the fantastical aspects: ” ‘We asked the netherworld bureaucrats and received one time return-to-earth permits,’ Grandmother explained. More pearls filled my heart.” But these objections belong to another tradition than the one See is writing about. She manages, with great dexterity, to make them seem irrelevant. A novel whose protagonist hangs, after death, from a room’s rafters and climbs inside a rival’s womb to untangle a child’s umbilical cord, who dies of self-starvation and communes with the ghosts of her mother and grandmother, who pens a major commentary on a seemingly seditious text and ends up reconciled with both of her successor-wives — well, suffice it to say that the pleasures of Peony in Love are neither those of logic nor chronology. Years pass in a paragraph; realms are traversed in a line. This reader felt, from time to time, almost literally transported and commends the willing suspension of Western disbelief. There’s much here to be savored and a great deal to be learned.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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The Painted Veil (2007)

Starring: Naomi Watts, Edward Norton Director: John Curran (II) Rating

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
Produced by Edward Norton and Naomi Watts, The Painted Veil works well as a movie–even better as an actor’s showcase. The year is 1925. When her domineering mother pressures her to marry, Kitty (Watts) settles for shy bacteriologist Walter (Norton). Then Walter is transferred from London to Shanghai and the lonely and bored Kitty drifts into an affair with married diplomat Charlie (Liev Schreiber). When Walter finds out, he makes a startling proposition: either Kitty accompanies him to the cholera-infested countryside or he’ll divorce her. With no other prospects, she comes along on what looks like a double-suicide mission. Based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil was adapted by Philadelphia’s Ron Nyswaner (who knows a little something about infectious diseases). As two previous versions made little impact–despite Garbo’s presence in the 1934 melodrama–John Curran’s film is sure to stand as definitive. Interestingly, Norton, who studied Chinese history at Yale, chose Watts as his co-star, while Watts chose Curran, for whom she appeared in 2004’s underrated We Don’t Live Here Anymore. Filmed on location, the handsome production is, in many respects, just as old-fashioned as its source material–sex is merely suggested and Kitty is shocked that their English neighbor (Toby Jones) has a Chinese lover–but the ending packs a feminist twist. Mostly though, The Painted Veil is about the acting, and Watts and Norton, along with Diana Rigg as a disillusioned Mother Superior, have rarely been better. –Kathleen C. Fennessy

Product Description
Based on the classic novel by W. Somerset Maugham, “The Painted Veil” is a love story set in the 1920s that tells the story of a young English couple, Walter, a middle class doctor and Kitty, an upper-class woman, who get married for the wrong reasons and relocate to Shanghai, where she falls in love with someone else. When he uncovers her infidelity, in an act of vengeance, he accepts a job in a remote village in China ravaged by a deadly epidemic, and takes her along. Their journey brings meaning to their relationship and gives them purpose in one of the most remote and beautiful places on earth.

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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel (Paperback)

by Lisa See (Author) “I AM WHAT THEY CALL IN OUR VILLAGE “ONE WHO HAS NOT yet died”-a widow, eighty years old…”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. See’s engrossing novel set in remote 19th-century China details the deeply affecting story of lifelong, intimate friends (laotong, or “old sames”) Lily and Snow Flower, their imprisonment by rigid codes of conduct for women and their betrayal by pride and love. While granting immediacy to Lily’s voice, See (Flower Net) adroitly transmits historical background in graceful prose. Her in-depth research into women’s ceremonies and duties in China’s rural interior brings fascinating revelations about arranged marriages, women’s inferior status in both their natal and married homes, and the Confucian proverbs and myriad superstitions that informed daily life. Beginning with a detailed and heartbreaking description of Lily and her sisters’ foot binding (”Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you have peace”), the story widens to a vivid portrait of family and village life. Most impressive is See’s incorporation of nu shu, a secret written phonetic code among women-here between Lily and Snow Flower-that dates back 1,000 years in the southwestern Hunan province (”My writing is soaked with the tears of my heart,/ An invisible rebellion that no man can see”). As both a suspenseful and poignant story and an absorbing historical chronicle, this novel has bestseller potential and should become a reading group favorite as well.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Lily at 80 reflects on her life, beginning with her daughter days in 19th-century rural China. Foot-binding was practiced by all but the poorest families, and the graphic descriptions of it are not for the fainthearted. Yet women had nu shu, their own secret language. At the instigation of a matchmaker, Lily and Snow Flower, a girl from a larger town and supposedly from a well-connected, wealthy family, become laotong, bound together for life. Even after Lily learns that Snow Flower is not from a better family, even when Lily marries above her and Snow Flower beneath her, they remain close, exchanging nu shu written on a fan. When war comes, Lily is separated from her husband and children. She survives the winter helped by Snow Flower’s husband, a lowly butcher, until she is reunited with her family. As the years pass, the women’s relationship changes; Lily grows more powerful in her community, bitter, and harder, until at last she breaks her bond with Snow Flower. They are not reunited until Lily tries to make the dying Snow Flower’s last days comfortable. Their friendship, and this tale, illustrates the most profound of human emotions: love and hate, self-absorption and devotion, pride and humility, to name just a few. Even though the women’s culture and upbringing may be vastly different from readers’ own, the life lessons are much the same, and they will be remembered long after the details of this fascinating story are forgotten.-Molly Connally, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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The Coming China Wars: Where They Will Be Fought and How They Can Be Won (Hardcover)

by Peter Navarro (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In this comprehensive, contemporary look at the awakening giant that is China, Peter Navarro describes an emerging power beleaguered by both internal and external threats-if the Japanese don’t get them, AIDS and SARS will. This will reassure those readers who are increasingly convinced that the Chinese will eat us for lunch. However, as Navarro points out, China’s human and natural resources make her a formidable global player-and her native, amoral ruthlessness suggests she will win. Still, as a nation undergoing its Industrial Revolution in the Information Age, China has her problems transitioning from Communism to capitalist imperialism, as seems to be her goal. True, government and industry have forged strong bonds (that allow them to exploit slave labor and ignore environmental and economic constraints that hamper other nations), but like any modern nation, China is paying the price of competing in a global economy: pollution; rapacious private medical care expenses; an aging, under-pensioned population; international tensions; and a large and disgruntled peasant working class. Navarro, whose inclination to breathless hyperbole makes even a chapter on dam construction exciting, tellingly devotes 10 chapters to China’s problems and one to their solution-essentially tired policy prescriptions (wean the U.S. from oil dependence and cheap Chinese imports). This informative book will teach readers to understand the dragon, just not how to vanquish it.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“In this informative volume, Navarro explores China’s impact on the world and the perils it creates. … This provocative and potentially controversial book will be of value to a wide audience. Summing Up: Highly recommended.  

        –CHOICE, April 2007

“…serves as an important touchstone for any prudent discussion regarding the implications to China’s growth. For those unfamiliar with China’s ecological disaster, natural-resource crisis or aging and soon to be inverted demographics, this book is a very good introduction.”  

           –Benjamin A Shobert, Asia Times

“In this comprehensive examination of China’s mushrooming economy, Navarro masterfully illuminates the dark sides of China’s great leaps into privatization and globalization.”

             –Cecil Johnson, Boston Globe

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Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China (Paperback)

by Jung Chang (Author) “At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general, the police chief of a tenuous national government of China…”

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
In Wild Swans Jung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century. Chang’s grandmother was a warlord’s concubine. Her gently raised mother struggled with hardships in the early days of Mao’s revolution and rose, like her husband, to a prominent position in the Communist Party before being denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself marched, worked, and breathed for Mao until doubt crept in over the excesses of his policies and purges. Born just a few decades apart, their lives overlap with the end of the warlords’ regime and overthrow of the Japanese occupation, violent struggles between the Kuomintang and the Communists to carve up China, and, most poignant for the author, the vicious cycle of purges orchestrated by Chairman Mao that discredited and crushed millions of people, including her parents. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Bursting with drama, heartbreak and horror, this extraordinary family portrait mirrors China’s century of turbulence. Chang’s grandmother, Yu-fang, had her feet bound at age two and in 1924 was sold as a concubine to Beijing’s police chief. Yu-fang escaped slavery in a brothel by fleeing her “husband” with her infant daughter, Bao Qin, Chang’s mother-to-be. Growing up during Japan’s brutal occupation, free-spirited Bao Qin chose the man she would marry, a Communist Party official slavishly devoted to the revolution. In 1949, while he drove 1000 miles in a jeep to the southwestern province where they would do Mao’s spadework, Bao Qin walked alongside the vehicle, sick and pregnant (she lost the child). Chang, born in 1952, saw her mother put into a detention camp in the Cultural Revolution and later “rehabilitated.” Her father was denounced and publicly humiliated; his mind snapped, and he died a broken man in 1975. Working as a “barefoot doctor” with no training, Chang saw the oppressive, inhuman side of communism. She left China in 1978 and is now director of Chinese studies at London University. Her meticulous, transparent prose radiates an inner strength. Photos. BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power (Hardcover)

by Rob Gifford (Author)

Editorial Reviews

National Public Radio China correspondent Gifford journeyed for six weeks on China’s Mother Road, Route 312, from its beginning in Shanghai for nearly 3,000 miles to a tiny town in what used to be known as Turkestan. The route picks up the old Silk Road, which runs through the Gobi Desert to Central Asia to Persia and on to Europe. Along the way, Gifford meets entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on China’s growing economy, citizens angry and frustrated with government corruption, older people alarmed at changes in Chinese culture and morality, and young people uncertain and excited about the future. Gifford profiles ordinary Chinese people coping with tumultuous change as development and commerce shrink a vast geography, bringing teeming cities and tiny towns into closer commercial and cultural proximity; the lure of wealth is changing the Chinese character and sense of shared experience, even if it was common poverty. Gifford notes an aggressive sense of competition in the man-eat-man atmosphere of a nation that is likely to be the next global superpower. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Advance praise for China Road

“How I envy Rob Gifford and his journey along China Road. How grateful I am to him for allowing me to share the trip through his vivid writing and his deep knowledge of and great love for China. As vicarious enjoyment goes, this one’s a ten.”
-Ted Koppel, managing editor, Discovery Channel

“Rob Gifford has found the perfect road trip. His years in China have given him a keen eye and a deep understanding of the country’s contradictions; he’s the perfect guide to this magnificent road from Shanghai to the Kazakhstan border.”
-Peter Hassler, author of River Town and Oracle Bones

“My gosh, I loved Rob Gifford’s book. His journey along Route 312 is a great road story-from Hooters in Shanghai to the Iron House of Confucianism. China Road is insightful, funny, analytical, anecdotal, full of humble humor and magnificent discoveries.”
-Scott Simon, host of NPR’s Weekend Edition and author of Pretty Birds

“Here is China end to end, told from its equivalent of Route 66 as Gifford journeys from Shanghai to the distant west, talking to truck drivers, merchants, hermits, and whores. Gifford portrays China with affection and humor, in all its complexity, energy, hopefulness, and risk.”
-Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science, Columbia University

“Equal parts Bill Bryson and Jonathan Spence. Gifford is great company and great fun, and China Road is a terrific, highly readable book.”
-Jim Yardley, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Beijing correspondent

“A great book, a terrific read. Rob Gifford’s story is as engaging as any travel writing, but it is equally full of historical and philosophical wisdom about the future of the world’s largest country.”
-Joseph S. Nye, Jr., former assistant secretary of defense, Distinguished Service Professor, Harvard University

“After six years in Beijing, NPR’s Rob Gifford has written a wonderfully reflective but also well-informed account of his road trip across China. His knowledge and insight about China’s past and present do a marvelous job in helping the reader understand all the challenges that confront this very dynamic country’s future.”
-Orville Schell, director, the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations

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Instant Immersion Mandarin Chinese: Deluxe (Audio CD)

by Instant Immersion (Author)

Book Description
From Mianyang to Macau, now you can join the conversation with Instant Immersion Chinese Audio Deluxe, the dynamic language learning system comprising recorded audio instruction and printed lesson reinforcement.

Audio Instruction (8 Compact Discs) Progressive instruction designed by university instructors to demonstrate fast results in spoken Chinese.

Audio Course Guide (CD-ROM) The complete, printable transcript of your audio lessons on CD-ROM, which allows you to follow along. BONUS: Talk Now! Chinese on CD-ROM Talk Now! keys into your natural language-learning ability by offering comprehensive fundamental vocabulary and accurate pronunciation in a fun, user-friendly format.

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