A treasure trove of information that will likely be useful to prospective tourists.
Brown, a business professor at Xiamen University, takes readers on a comprehensive tour of the Chinese city of Quanzhou in this guide.
Quanzhou is, as the author puts it, a “legendary city” and the largest metropolitan area in its Fujian province; it’s home to nearly 9 million residents and the home of a port with a thriving economy. The author became enchanted with Quanzhou when he first visited the city in 1989 but soon realized that it was virtually unknown outside of China, particularly among English speakers. In these pages, Brown sets out to correct that situation. This encyclopedically thorough account of its history and culture seems designed for the prospective tourist; for example, the author generally provides his insights in the form of lists—temples and architectural relics to view, areas to wander, cultural sites to visit, foods to sample, and much more, all delivered in a casually friendly style: “Let’s face it, eating is a big part of life, so we might as well enjoy it, and Chinese are masters of both cooking and eating.” Brown pauses here and there to dispense history lessons, furnishing a brief description of Confucianism, for example, and explaining that the tea defiantly thrown overboard at the Boston Tea Party in 1773 came from Fujian. The author also seems to aim for comprehensiveness; readers learn what particular beer to drink in Fujian, for instance, as well what puppet festivals to visit. However, he usefully points out that while Quanzhou is a vibrantly modern city that plays a leading role in China’s Belt and Road Initiative—an infrastructure-building program—it also has a notable ancient history; he notes, for example, that the famous Ashab Mosque was constructed more than 1,000 years ago.
The author’s approach combines painstaking meticulousness with a goofy lightsomeness. For instance, while complaining about the mu, an obscure Chinese unit of land measure, he writes, “I don’t want to have a cow over ‘mus’ but sometimes they’re enough to make me bleat.” Much of the information he provides is eccentric, as when he relates that girls in Quanzhou’s Hui’an County wear a belt that carries “not only a girl’s dowry but also her marital insurance.” As one wearer shares, “My husband doesn’t dare leave me because I have all his wealth around my waist.” The one notable failing of the book, though, is borne out of a kind of identity crisis: It seems to double as a tourist guidebook and as a book-length advertisement for Quanzhou, as Brown avoids conveying even a hint of criticism about the locale; unlike other travel guides, he never counsels readers on what to avoid. One gets the impression that Quanzhou is an urban utopia, bereft of any crime or inconvenience, and one can’t help but wonder what might be missing from the account. However, as an English-language guide to Quanzhou, it’s incredibly informative and well organized and a good resource for people making their first trip there.
Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2022
ISBN: 9789811980350
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Springer
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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