Readers interested in contemporary China will find useful perspectives in these essays by a veteran China watcher.
A potpourri of critical observations about contemporary China from a noted sinologist.
Retired Princeton professor Link, now at the University of California, Riverside, is an expert on Chinese literature and popular culture. This collection of essays, most of them previously published, includes book reviews, op-ed pieces, literary criticism, and memoirish vignettes he’s written for the New York Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, and other venues. Grouped under four categories, “Captive China,” “Learning,” “Teachers,” and “Day Job Joys,” these essays, rendered in Link’s lucid prose, take us back to his early days as a student of Chinese literature in the 1960s, when China was virtually closed to the West. Link’s first in-person glimpse of China came in the fall of 1966, when he peered over the border separating the skyscrapers of Hong Kong from the rice paddies of Shenzhen—and spotted a water buffalo. From that first sighting, the young, naïve aficionado of Maoist China went on to teach Chinese language and literature at various U.S. colleges and became an authority in the field who was welcomed by China. But after he became interested in dissident writers, especially in the wake of the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, when he became vocal about human rights issues, Link was blacklisted by the Chinese government and has been denied entry to the country since 1996. While watching China from afar once again, Link wrote many pieces with a touch of nostalgia and a hunger for truth, whether reviews of fiction by authors like Ha Jin and Mo Yan, obituaries of dissenting intellectuals like Fang Lizhi and Liu Binyan, or scholarly studies of popular art forms like xiangsheng (crosstalk).
Readers interested in contemporary China will find useful perspectives in these essays by a veteran China watcher.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781589881983
Page Count: 287
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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