Provocative analysis of how China's culture will affect that nation's current and future behavior; by Jenner (History/Australian National Univ.). China is China is China—that, in brief, is Jenner's well- articulated message: that the weight of history, bureaucracy, language, philosophy, and national character make real change in China—though urgently necessary for economic reasons—virtually impossible. Jenner sees Communism as largely illusory in its effect, and the Party as little more than a ``club...the collective identity of China's ruling class...a shenshi or gentry...whose members will be able to adapt themselves to whatever follows....'' Real change, the author says, has occurred only when ``alien colonial power in Singapore, Hong Kong [or] Taiwan [was able] to break the continuity of Chinese bureaucracy and to permit growth and development.'' Cultural sophistication, a solid grasp of Asian history, crisp details, and clear conclusions lend credibility to Jenner's argument as he penetrates Chinese culture to the language itself and its peculiar ability, through lack of the usual verb tenses, to create ambivalence about time—and thus about change. Jenner examines the unequaled Chinese historical record and what its limitations reveal: a fatalistic and cyclical view of human experience that's the antithesis of the Western conviction that significant change can and will occur. And from the saga of the dynasties, he discerns an overwhelming tendency for the Chinese state to re-establish itself, whatever the current vicissitudes, in remarkably similar monolithic form. A consort's uncanny description of the aged Mao living exactly like an emperor, cut off from reality and reading ancient Chinese history, drives this point home. Jenner argues persuasively that China may be largely immutable, but he never really deals with today's ultimate agent of change: the information avalanche, which buried even the Soviet Union.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-7139-9060-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
Delightful, welcome nostalgia for a sadly bygone era.
This vivid New York City cultural history records in photographs the story of the Third Avenue elevated train, launched in 1878 as one of the first lines in the city’s rapid-transit systems.
The author’s father, Lothar Stelter, took a myriad of photographs with his Contessa camera in the early ’50s, when he worked as a cable splicer for the New York Telephone Company. Those photos, displayed here a bit too small on each page, demonstrate how teeming and alive this route was in the lifeline of the city. The steam-powered elevated trains had to accommodate the rapid growth of New York at the turn of the century, comprising four routes from Lower Manhattan to 155th Street–though the Third Avenue line would gradually extend into the Bronx–and culminating in peak ridership by 1920, before the more efficient subways began to take over. A nickel fare (up until 1948) ensured its popularity. The Third Avenue El created a distinctive look along a busy thoroughfare, casting a trellis-like pattern onto the street from the overhead webbed ironwork, wooden catwalks and Victorian glasswork in the windows of the stations. The photographer captured the construction details beautifully, and in all kinds of weather, as passengers frozen in period suits and hats gaze down at the street crammed with DeSoto taxis, Studebakers and sidewalk vendors. Chapters follow the journey up Third Avenue, lined by pawn shops, antiques stores and Irish pubs, from Chinatown to Murray Hill to Yorkville to East Harlem. Former residents, shopkeepers and commuters fondly recall here the noisy train that brought them to the Automat at 42nd Street, Wankels Hardware at 88th Street or the Ruppert Brewery at 93rd Street. Next to these arresting images of the city’s history, views of today’s sleekly transformed Third Avenue–the El was demolished in the mid-’50s–seem soulless and monolithic.
Delightful, welcome nostalgia for a sadly bygone era.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-9777220-1-3
Page Count: 132
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Poor Provence. Like some geographical cousin to the Golden Goose, it is sentenced to an eternity of laying golden eggs for Mayle (Up the Agency, 1993, etc.). In this extravagant book, Mayle teams up with Jason Hawkes, whose aerial photographs of vineyards, asymmetrically laid out French villes, marinas, freight yards, mountains, churches, and jet skis will put American readers where they like to be—above the French. Mayle's economical text is an arch accompaniment: ``One of the features of rural France is the manner in which the farmer shows his disapproval of the way the world is going...there is always something to upset him, and he often takes his revenge in messy and spectacular fashion. He dumps. He dumps melons on the steps of the Mairie, he dumps potatoes on the autoroute, he dumps cherries in the village fountain or, as he has done here, he dumps tomatoes on the banks of the Durance.'' The photo that accompanies this tribute to Gallic gall is quite spectacular, for, by a trick of perspective, the tomatoes, in varying stages of ripeness and color, look like a carnival of fungus climbing a rock.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43564-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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