Posts Tagged ‘Books’

Steve Weiss of Zacuto USA is the mother of all mensches! Of course, Weiss is the main man from here and here, where you’ll learn more about filmmaking, cinematography, filmmaking trends, and good wine from the twin shows of Filmfellas and [ critics ] than you will from weeks of book reading (given how titles are dated from just about the moment they go to print).

No, but seriously, Steve is a truly colossal dude.

Several months ago he Express UPSed (!!!) me a comp hardcover copy of journeyman filmmaker Tom Reilly’s memoir-cum-tell all, The Big Picture: Filmmaking Lessons from A Life On the Set, a work detailing veteran Tom Reilly’s entire life experience making flicker pictures alongside industry gods like Woody Allen as part of practically every on-set job that exists: First AD, Second AD, line producer, production assistant, camera operator, producer, director. In short, if a role exists for something taking place on a film set, chances are Tom Reilly’s played it at some point during his storied career.

Expect to sail through this title from start to finish as it’s not written in the traditional (read: boring) “how-to” style.

Read the rest of this entry »

Going old school | Writing chez moi | Isn’t that odd?
Approximately 18h
The Czechs clash with their former overlords today on the ice. A little too much mustard, a little too late, don’t you think? ;-P There will be drunks on Prague’s streets tonight…

Kang Chol-Hwan’s bestselling North Korean captivity memoir found itself on my required reading list for May. When it slid into my mailbox last week I – again – nearly plowed through its pages in record time. These “single sitting finishes” have been happening to me often lately, a good sign, alas. Means I’m picking them correctly. Means we’re getting close. Means…well, it means a whole lot of things!

So what is it about titles like The Aquariums of Pyongyang?

Why do I find myself drawn so magnetically to these sorts of emotive sagas recounting the tragedies of seemingly hopeless individuals who find themselves staring dead into the snake eyes of what Life has to offer, only to emerge on the other side wiser, more enlightened, and more worldly then ever before?

The story of author Kang’s life is horrific in the extreme.

Read the rest of this entry »

At the Foxhole, Beginning My Afternoon Navel Gaze
14:00 CET
In search of grist…for the mill, of course!

Have you ever noticed how many English-language Chinese blogs (say that five times fast!) there are?

Sadly, I believe the time has come to drastically reduce the number of these truly redundant boards, these mostly paltry attempts to reinvent the wheel by reprising what’s already been written countless times online. We must begin to streamline these available offerings into a tight fist of “absolute-must-go-to” sites. Absolute online musts which shouldn’t be missed, in other words, with the rest somehow shunted off to the sidelines, clearly delineated as minor league attempts to achieve the same effect as the A-Listers.

I observed this recently while surfing through the offerings at Hao Hao Report, the creation of Ryan McLaughlin, a fellow “crazy Canuck,” and bionic blogger in his own right. I was astounded by the volume of stuff posted there, with seemingly less regard (not no regard, just less) for post quality or post appropriateness. It had been mentioned to me a few weeks ago by a China-blogging fellow and after devoting a considerable amount of time to Hao Hao during yesterday’s European afternoon, I couldn’t agree with the chap more.

In a situation of decentralized Chinese cities, say, where the wonders of the interwebs were unavailable to geographically-disparate expats in search of relevant information or in order to commiserate or seek out fellow-foreign succor, it made sense to have 20 different expatriate magazines or 35 different expatriate newspapers, each replicating the content of the rest. That made sense from an old world media perspective.

But in a Chinese marketplace where everything is being funneled around at the fingering of a hyper-sensitive touchpad, how many redundancies should the market allow?

Again, this seeming polemic piece might remind some of those “Top Ten” lists from a few weeks back, but it’s important to remember that just because one has a right to found and regularly publish to their own blog – thanks (or no thanks?) the decentralization of blogging tools – it doesn’t mean it should always happen.

Read the rest of this entry »

Funny how referrals work, you know? I was simply blowing though Jan Wong’s sensational China Whispers: Searching for Forgiveness in Beijing a couple of weeks back and stumbled upon Aussie author Anna Funder’s Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall.

Given how I suffer from an incurable case of ostologie, I leapt at the chance to snatch up my copy of Funder’s coming-of-age travelogue as soon as I returned to the Golden Burg (Prague). And – sports fans – I’m pleased to announce that I whipped through this one equally as quickly.

Get a look at this author, will ya?

Yowzahs!

But getting completely serious again (for just a moment), let’s pay due respects to Funder’s stalwart effort to compile a truly quality piece of non-fiction writing. Spliced together over the course of approximately seven years of painstaking personal research – both behind and in front of the Wall — Stasiland (affiliate link)  is the author’s attempt to give a distinctly human face to the one-time formidable, cunning, and truly thorough state security apparatus, the Stasi, by going way behind the headlines and monstrous rhetoric to the far reaches of the former German Democratic Republic’s frontiers. It was here where Funder would uncover stories of people who suffered torturously at the Stasi’s omnipotent devious hands.

A Divided Germany

The Stasi’s Emblem

Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s post is going to be less a straight-ahead book report, kids, and more of a mambsy-pambsy writer’s statement about how this war-era novel, Sarah’s Key made me feel, deep deep inside.

I polished off the read in just a single sitting. Four hours, baby, cover-to-cover (approximately 320pp). I’m not normally that speedy, but the story held me in its vice-like grip from round about page ten and didn’t let go until the very last sentence. No guff. Now would I kid you about something this serious?

Why have I opted for the gushier jelly-like consistency of a “emotional statement” today as opposed to my usual hardboiled prose? Well, I suppose it’s just because I woke up this morning feeling that I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Better reviewers than your not-so-humble blogger here have assembled sensational reviews about Tatiana de Rosnay’s

bestselling French Occupation-era piece over the past couple of years and change, so if you’re keen on a plain vanilla-flavored stepwise plot summary, I’m sure you can click around for one of those.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve long-admired Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom’s China writings for the way in which this author succeeds in making the country’s more obscure bits that much clearer for the novice China enthusiast or budding Sinologist.

Rather than further mystify the country’s infamous “exoticness” to Westerners and cast his readers further into doubt in copping to that most annoying of journalist/blogger catchalls like “if it’s one thing for certain, nothing is ever what it appears to be in China and everything changes constantly,” Wasserstrom distances himself from the usual scholarly bluster and navel-gazing by employing a novel Q&A approach in getting his book’s premise across. China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know indeed attempts, as its title promises, to include just about everything anyone needs to know about China.

Leaving aside for the moment the discussion about the quality of the material to be found inside its covers or about Professor Wasserstrom’s throw-down (though I love it!) that what you’re about to read is “what everyone needs to know” about China, the book’s written using concise, accessible, easy-to-digest paragraphs.

This Socratic technique alone places the book firmly into front-of-mind awareness for the novice China reader. Those finding themselves armed with only the most rudimentary of knowledge about that juggernaut nation to the East will walk away, as Wasserstrom surmises “…[knowing] a few more basic things about the people of the PRC than they did when they read its first pages.” Old China Hands, too, might appreciate this book as a ready reference, and perhaps even those claiming “expert” status about the country will be pleasantly surprised to discover how the book challenges several of their rigorously-held assumptions. As for myself, someone who considers himself a novice in chinoisierie, it achieved its mission masterfully. At a compact 135pp, I agree with scholarly reviewer Susan Shirk who claimed that the book “…provides the essential knowledge that intelligent citizens need to have about China…[that] can be read in less time than it takes to fly from the U.S. to China!”

Read the rest of this entry »

Many thanks to University of California Irvine (UCI) professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom for this excellent book referral, among the half dozen or so titles he’s already suggested since we’ve met. Oh, wait, you say you don’t know who Professor Wasserstrom is?! Then you need to take a moment and look at some of these clever titles before you carry on reading. When you’re done, hop on over to The China Beat for a sampling of what the good professor and his China blogging colleagues in chinoisierie Kate Merkel-Hess and Kenneth L. Pomeranz have in store for you.

Read the rest of this entry »

For a while, I’d been considering not doing up a review of Michael Breen’s excellent The Koreans. I figured why waste the time covering a work which was more than seven years old (and counting) which wouldn’t add anything novel to the conversation about the peninsula, or improve upon anything I’ve said about Korea thus far?

You need that? Well I didn’t think so…

Still, there were several salient themes which filtered throughout Breen’s work that I thought would bear mentioning here, since these are things which aren’t disappearing anytime soon and would probably best of us to get acquainted with while we still have time and Kim Jong-il/Bam Bam hasn’t yet done anything untoward or rash.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thank heavens for small miracles, folks. Small miracles like globalization.

Why?

Well thanks to this most ornery of mega-planetary economic phenomena, one can always remain confident of somehow finding themselves at an English language bookshop in pretty much any large European city, regardless of the national language. And let’s face it, the very best fictional and non-fictional works today are churned out in the English language, folks, and there’s no debate there. Globalization means more English books available for the road-weary in all of us. Stranded hopelessly because of some geological narishkeit taking place on that lone frigid island somewhere off in the Atlantic. Anyways…

It’s with that in mind that I was happy to stumble across Jan Wong’s most excellent Chinese Whispers: A Journey Into Betrayal (336pp, paperback, British edition, US edition here, affiliate link) in one of my favorite Bern bookshops, Thalia.ch. Thalia’s housed in the “soussol” of Bern’s Loeb department store, located directly in front of the Swiss capital’s main train station, or hauptbahnhof, in case you’ll be passing through the city anytime soon. Note on language: don’t you just love how Swiss German, as a tongue, borrows liberally from the French? – hochdeutsch this throaty German is not, all you linguistic purists out there. Understandable, I guess, given how the country is trilingual (or nominally quadrilingual) and borders, ew, France. Still, I always chuckle whenever I overhear a Berner or Zuricher give directions to some wayward German or Austrian tourist while using the word strasse, or street. Instead of saying the word properly, as a Hamburger or a Berliner might, they drag out their variation’s a, roll its r, and do their level best to sound like Bill or Ted in some cheesy ‘80s flick. The word ends up sounding like straaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasse, which to indeed is an acquired taste; though my love of the Swiss, especially in the German-speaking cantons, remains as strong as ever. The worst part about Swiss German is how they cause all these hot Latin immigrants to gobble up the Swiss German accent hook, line, and sinker. They give them a disease they don’t want to have. It’s like rape. It’s like what mange cake (literally “cake-eating,” but what are otherwise white people) Torontonians do to their immigrants: they make bland white bread out of exotic Latinos and South Americans and it’s a damn cryin’ shame. Though I digress (but I’m entitled to since I’ve just returned from a marathon thirty hour combined train and bus journey).

Read the rest of this entry »