Readers will learn essential skills like how to haggle, exchange currencies, cross the street, decipher menus, say useful phrases in Chinese, and more. The guide comes complete with survival tips on etiquette, a map, and resource lists. Don’t leave home for China without it!Veteran travelers Qin and Larry Herzberg are Chinese language and culture professors at Calvin College in Michigan.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing." – Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (from Amazon)

    Winner of the National Book Award for Marcel Proust, a sweeping examination of Proust's life and works, Shattuck now offers a useful and eminently readable guidebook to Proust's epic masterpiece, and a contemplation of memory and consciousness throughout great literature. Here, Shattuck laments Proust's defenselessness against zealous editors, praises some translations, and presents Proust as a novelist whose philosophical gifts were matched only by his irrepressible comic sense. Proust's Way, the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship, will serve as the next generation's guide to one of the world's finest writers of fiction.

    

    Its extensive analysis integrates the complex and diverse political, social, intellectual, and economic histories of this area with an engaging and lively style. Popular because of its scope and coverage, the Fifth Edition of A History of Asia contains new boxed features that emphasize cross-cultural comparisons and expanded treatment of Southeast Asia. Additionally, a timeline and discussion questions have been added to each chapter, making the book even more student friendly.

     Free BONUS Inside! Whether you approve or disapprove, globalization is an inescapable feature of the modern world. Trade between nations and continents is now commonplace, and this exchange of goods is inevitably accompanied by the exchange of ideas and cultures. This is not, as you might expect, a new phenomenon. A series of trade routes which were first established almost two thousand years ago provided one of the first examples of intercontinental trade. Although these overland routes between Europe and Asia were not generally given a name during the period when they were in use, a nineteenth German writer and traveler, Ferdinand von Richthofen, used the name by which they have become famous; he called them the Seidenstrasse (the Silk Road). Of course, it wasn’t just silk that was traded on these routes—many other commodities traveled in both directions. For more than one thousand years, the Silk Road (or rather roads; there were actually several routes) provided the main trading link between east and west, which also enabled an exchange of philosophy, art, culture, and religion. It wasn’t until new maritime trade routes were established in the fifteenth century that the Silk Road finally began to decline in importance. It is difficult to overestimate the impact the Silk Road had on the development of civilization in both Europe and Asia. Without this trade route, the civilization of both continents would almost certainly have developed very differently. This is the story of the Silk Road. Discover a plethora of topics such as The Han Dynasty The War of the Heavenly Horses The Silk Trade A Route for New Ideas Marco Polo The Decline of the Silk Road And much more! So if you want a concise and informative book on the Silk Road, simply scroll up and click the "Buy now" button for instant access!

    Foster applies his much-loved combination of wit, know-how, and analysis to explain how each work has shaped our very existence as readers, students, teachers, and Americans.Foster illuminates how books such as The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, My Ántonia, The Great Gatsby, The Maltese Falcon, Their Eyes Were Watching God, On the Road, The Crying of Lot 49, and others captured an American moment, how they influenced our perception of nationhood and citizenship, and what about them endures in the American character. Twenty-five Books That Shaped America is a fun and enriching guide to America through its literature.

    A collection of seven critical essays discussing Tolstoy's novel, arranged in chronological order of their original publication.

    Where the fathers imbibed the doctrine of Confucius and learned the classics and revolted against them, these young people have been battered by many forces of the new times. They have been taught something of science, something of Christianity, something of atheism, something of free love, something of communism, something of Western philosophy, something of modern militarism, something, in fact, of everything. In the midst of the sturdy medievalism of the masses of their countrymen the young intellectuals have been taught the most extreme of every culture. Intellectually they have been forced to the same great omissions that China has made physically. They have skipped, figuratively speaking, from the period of the unimproved country road to the aero plane era. The omission was too great. The mind could not compensate for it. The spirit was lost in the conflict. The first result, therefore, of the hiatus was undoubtedly to produce a class of young Chinese, both men and women, but chiefly men, who frankly did not know how to live in their own country or in the age in which their country still was. They were for the most part educated abroad, where they forgot the realities of their own race. It was easy enough for various revolutionary leaders to persuade these alienated minds that China's so-called backwardness was due primarily to political and material interference by foreign powers. The world was made the scapegoat for Chinas medievalism. Instead of realizing that China was in her own way making her own steps, slowly, it is true, and somewhatponderously, toward modernity, it was easy hue and cry to say that if it had not been for foreigners she would have been already on an equality, in material terms, with other nations. The result of this was a fresh revolution of a sort. China practically rid herself of her two great grievances outside of Japan, extraterritoriality and the tariff. No great visible change appeared as a consequence. It became apparent that what had been weaknesses were still weaknesses, and that these were inherent in the ideology of the people. It was found, for instance, that when a revolutionary leader became secure and entrenched he became conservative and as corrupt, too often, as an old style official. The same has been true in other histories. There were too many honest and intelligent young minds in China not to observe and accept the truth, that the outside world had very little to do with Chinas condition, and what she had to do with it could have been prevented if China had been earlier less sluggish and her leaders less blind and selfish. Then followed a period of despair and frenzy and increased idealistic worship of the West. The evident prosperity of foreign countries was felt to be a direct fruit of Western scientific development.

    Volume 2: From the Great Qing Empire through the People's Republic of China (1644—2009).

    A young poet named Liao Yiwu, who had up until then lead an apolitical bohemian existence, found his voice in that moment, and, like the solitary man who stood firmly in front of a line of tanks, Liao proclaimed his outrage—only his weapon would be his words. Liao's memoir, For a Song and a Hundred Songs, captures the four dehumanizing years he spent in jail for writing the incendiary poem "Massacre." Through the power and beauty of his prose, he reveals the brutal reality of crowded Chinese prisons—the harassment from guards and fellow prisoners, the torture, the conflicts among human beings in close confinement, and the boredom of everyday life. Hailed by Philip Gourevitch as "one of the most original and remarkable Chinese writers of our time," Liao presents a stark and devastating portrait of a nation in flux, exposing a side of China that outsiders rarely ever get to see. This honest account and witness to history will forever change the way you view the rising superpower of China.

    This foundation scripture teaches the supreme doctrine of nirvana and the way to the highest possible happiness for mankind. Oxford professor Dr. Max Muller, a great scholar and Orientalist, did the translation.

    The much honored biographer unearths the life and work of Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck, whose novels captured ordinary life in China.

    Enhancing their work are four seasonally-themed groups of verse, many written by Basho’s students and associates. The translation is thoroughly readable and contemporary, and the images evocative. An enlightening introduction offers biographical information on the featured poets, background on the nature of haiku and its development within the Japanese poetic tradition, and a short account of the Buddhist practice to which most of the writers were connected.