books Posts

Oct272011

Posted By
Nicki

Review: Yes China! An English Teacher’s Love-Hate Relationship with a Foreign Country

I’m a huge bibliophile. When I moved to China in 2005, half my luggage weight allotment went to books. I knew that, living in Hainan, I probably wouldn’t have access to the kind of foreign language (i.e. English) bookstores you can find in Beijing or Shanghai. So I brought my own. Of course I could never bring enough. Not even enough for the first year that we had committed to, let alone the nearly seven total that we’ve stayed for so far.

So I’m very acquisitive regarding books. I borrow them from friends, and have been lucky to have generous friends who love books just as much as me. I buy suitcase-fuls every time we leave Hainan. Ever since I got my HTC Android phone, I’ve been ecstatic about my ability to just download books anytime I want to. So when Ryan asked me if I wanted to read and review a new book on China for Lost Laowai, I was thrilled. I love books! I love China! Sign me up.

Clark Nielsen, author of “Yes China!“, gifted my Kindle reader with a copy of his book, and I was set to go. (Yes, Kindle does work on my Android phone, in case anybody was wondering.)

I read the book fairly quickly, but ever since then, I’ve been struggling with what to write in this review.

Oct252010

1Comment

Posted By
Ryan

‘Electric Voices and Stinky Tofu’ on your bookshelf

I first heard of MandMX.com back about a year and a half ago when they featured Lost Laowai in a comic of theirs. So when Magnus, the “M” of MandMX, contacted me to let me know they’d compiled their large collection of bilingual, China-themed comics into a new book, I was excited to get my hands on it.

Dubbed with the quirky moniker “Electric Voices and Stinky Tofu“, The book is an illustrated journey of ah-ha moments for any Westerner who’s spent time in China. Magnus, and his wife MingXing, have cartooned nearly every “China moment” I could think of — inking out what we all know from living here — China’s one wacky place.

I chatted with Magnus recently about the book and living in China. Here’s what he had to say:

Jan062010

11Comments

Posted By
Ryan

Video: Peter Hessler on China’s Past and Present

While it’s not new (but new to me), here is an interesting talk on C-SPAN by Peter Hessler, best known as the author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze and Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China. Hessler does a great job of reminding us (even several years since this talk) that despite its massive amount of change, when you get outside of the first and second tier cities, China is still a whole different world.

Particularly interesting for people new to China or looking for some even-handed information on China is the Q&A period mid-way through the talk. If you don’t have much time (the whole video is nearly an hour), I suggest jumping over to the source page and checking out the chapter breakdown to cherry pick some of the more interesting questions.

May062009

7Comments

Posted By
Ryan

Cunningham reliving Tiananmen in new book

I ran across an article at Found in China entitled Chai Ling: then and now, which made mention of Philip J Cunningham, author of a new book called Tiananmen Moon. Over the years I’ve seen an article here or there about Cunningham, but had no idea he was so intimately involved in the protest, being [...]

Aug032008

11Comments

Posted By
JohnG

Did China Follow The Shock Doctrine?

When China shifted its view on food subsidies this week, it was considered a major about face for a country that has been open to free trade for the last 30 years. According to writer Naomi Klein in the conclusion of her book The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism, this turn is happening [...]

May022008

2Comments

Posted By
JohnG

Book Review: A Journey Down China’s Route 66

Since it’s the May Labour Day holiday in China this week, lots of Chinese are out traveling, and since I hate crowds I am not. What I did spend my first day of the three day holiday doing was finishing up Rob Gifford’s great book China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising [...]

Feb232008

38Comments

Posted By
JohnG

A Man at the Center of Change in 19th Century China

For all those Chinese parents looking to get their kids into Harvard or Yale, they should take their noses out of those how-to-books writen by parents of successful students and instead read the biography of one of their countrymen. Yung Wing’s My Life in China and America (China Economic Review Publishing) is the biography of [...]