An excellent resource for those who live and work at a place where Chinese and Western viewpoints coincide.
A fresh view of China's emergence as a global economic force from two writers with extensive personal background in the East and West, who take a careful historical approach to claims as to how the interaction among Chinese and Western cultures will bring a new dynamic approach to world trade.
Like many who have studied China’s growing influence in the West, these authors assert that the nation’s economic growth will change the world dramatically. This ambitious survey shows how distinct definitions of self, nation and empire have emerged and changed in the East and West throughout the centuries, drawing upon an extensive body of scholarship. Although Tai P. Ng holds a doctorate in geophysics, neither author specializes in academic China studies. However, each has an extensive background in both parts of the world. This may be why their refreshing approach eschews headline-grabbing predictions about inevitable conflict between China and Western nations, while also avoiding claims that either culture holds superior values. Neither China nor the West is portrayed as exotic or dangerous. Instead, this is a fascinating account of how past similarities and differences between the East and West provide the groundwork for a new culture that will reshape our lives in the future. The authors reveal that business and world trade are hardly new to the Chinese tradition even while contemporary interaction with the West brings a new dynamic to conventional trade. Academic readers may find this survey lacking in theoretical context and overly broad in summarizing significant historical events. But the authors’ careful research and personal experiences lend authority to their claims, providing an excellent introduction to China’s past and present that breaks down many common preconceptions. The sometimes pedantic tone could put off a novice reader, but the careful explication of central values in the East and West will reward those who want to understand why basic Western assumptions about the world differ from those in China and how global economics may evolve in the future. Moreover, a non-judgmental approach to both cultures makes this an important contribution to the body of literature about China written for the layperson.
An excellent resource for those who live and work at a place where Chinese and Western viewpoints coincide.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-595-41846-6
Page Count: 376
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
