Patrick Hanan praises the volume as -the highest achievement in the contemporary Chinese story.- Henry Miller considers Pai Hsien-yung -a master of portraiture.- Stories from this collection have already been translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese and Korean.

    Tuchman won the Pulitzer Prize for Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 in 1972. She uses the life of Joseph Stilwell, the military attache to China in 1935-39 and commander of United States forces and allied chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek in 1942-44, to explore the history of China from the revolution of 1911 to the turmoil of World War II, when China's Nationalist government faced attack from Japanese invaders and Communist insurgents. Her story is an account of both American relations with China and the experiences of one of our men on the ground. In the cantankerous but level-headed Vinegar Joe, Tuchman found a subject who allowed her to perform, in the words of The National Review, one of the historian's most envied magic acts: conjoining a fine biography of a man with a fascinating epic story.

    Unlike what is usually considered Chinese poetry, it is a hybrid of prose and rhymed verse, more expansive than the condensed lyrics, verging on what would be called Whitmanesque. The thirteen long poems included here are descriptions of and meditations on such subjects as mountains and abandoned cities, the sea and the wind, owls and goddesses, partings and the idle life. Burton Watson is universally considered the foremost English-language translator of classical Chinese literature of the past five decades. His graceful translations are accompanied by a comprehensive introduction to the development and characteristics of the "fu" form, as well as excerpts from contemporary commentary on the genre. A pathbreaking study of premodern Chinese literature, "Chinese Rhyme-Prose" was selected as one of sixty-five masterpieces for the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. First published in 1971, it has been out of print for decades.

    Excellent Book

    

    The first two parts of Volume IV deal respectively with the physical sciences and with the diverse applications of physics in the many branches of mechanical engineering. The third deals with civil and hydraulic engineering and with nautical technology.

    A lyric form which, using a predominantly four-character line, had earlier been employed in the Confucian Book of Odes, it rose to prominence once more in the period under discussion. The new shih, which differed from the original form only in its use of a five- or seven-character line, became the best known and most characteristic of Chinese poetic forms.