Archive for the ‘English Books’ Category
The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. By Richard Curt Kraus
The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. By Richard Curt Kraus. Oxford University Press 2012. ISBN: 0199740550; 9780199740550.
China’s decade-long Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution shook the politics of China and the world. Even as we approach its fiftieth anniversary, the movement remains so contentious that the Chinese Communist Party still forbids fully open investigation of its origins, development, and conclusion. Drawing upon a vital trove of scholarship, memoirs, and popular culture, this Very Short Introduction illuminates this complex, often obscure, and still controversial movement. Moving beyond the figure of Mao Zedong, Richard Curt Kraus links Beijing’s elite politics to broader aspects of society and culture, highlighting many changes in daily life, employment, and the economy. Kraus also situates this very nationalist outburst of Chinese radicalism within a global context, showing that the Cultural Revolution was mirrored in the radical youth movement that swept much of the world, and that had imagined or emotional links to China’s red guards. Yet it was also during the Cultural Revolution that China and the United States tempered their long hostility, one of the innovations in this period that sowed the seeds for China’s subsequent decades of spectacular economic growth.
Richard Curt Kraus is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Oregon and the author of Pianos and Politics in China.
Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution. By Daniel Leese
Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution. By Daniel Leese. Cambridge University Press 2011. ISBN: 0521193672; 9780521193672; 0521152224; 9780521152228.
Mao Zedong’s political and cultural legacy remains potent even in today’s China. There have been many books that have explored his posthumous legacy, but none that has scrutinized the cult of Mao and the massive worship that was fostered around him at the height of his powers during the Cultural Revolution. This riveting book is the first to do so. By analyzing previously secret archival documents, obscure objects, and political pamphlets, Daniel Leese traces the tumultuous history of the cult within the Communist Party and at the grassroots level. The Party leadership’s original intention was to develop a prominent brand symbol, which would compete with the nationalists’ elevation of Chiang Kai-shek. They did not, however, anticipate that Mao would use this symbolic power to mobilize Chinese youth to rebel against party bureaucracy itself. The result was anarchy, and when the army was called in, it relied on mandatory rituals of worship, such as daily reading of the Little Red Book or performances of ‘the loyalty dance’, to restore order. Such fascinating detail sheds light not only on the personality cult of Mao, but also on hero-worship in other traditions.
Daniel Leese is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Chinese Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. He is the editor of Brill’s Encyclopedia of China (2008).
Henry Friendly, Greatest Judge of His Era. By David M. Dorsen
Henry Friendly, Greatest Judge of His Era. By David M. Dorsen. Foreword by Richard A. Posner. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2012, ISBN: 0674064399; 9780674064393
Henry Friendly is frequently grouped with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Learned Hand as the best American jurists of the twentieth century. In this first, comprehensive biography of Friendly, David M. Dorsen opens a unique window onto how a judge of this caliber thinks and decides cases, and how Friendly lived his life.
During his time on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (1959–1986), Judge Friendly was revered as a conservative who exemplified the tradition of judicial restraint. But he demonstrated remarkable creativity in circumventing precedent and formulating new rules in multiple areas of the law. Henry Friendly, Greatest Judge of His Era describes the inner workings of Friendly’s chambers and his craftsmanship in writing opinions. His articles on habeas corpus, the Fourth Amendment, self-incrimination, and the reach of the state are still cited by the Supreme Court.
Dorsen draws on extensive research, employing private memoranda between the judges and interviews with all fifty-one of Friendly’s law clerks—a veritable Who’s Who that includes Chief Justice John R. Roberts, Jr., six other federal judges, and seventeen professors at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and elsewhere. In his Foreword, Judge Richard Posner writes: “David Dorsen has produced the most illuminating, the most useful, judicial biography that I have ever read… We learn more about the American judiciary at its best than we can learn from any other… Some of what I’ve learned has already induced me to make certain changes in my judicial practice.”
Read More →
Enigmas of Identity. By Peter Brooks
Enigmas of Identity. By Peter Brooks. Princeton University Press 2011. ISBN: 069115158X; 978-0691151588.
Product Description
“We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going,” Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying to authenticate it, and inventing excuses for our unpersuasive stories about it. This wide-ranging book draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to examine important aspects of the emergence of identity as a peculiarly modern preoccupation.
In particular, the book addresses the social, legal, and personal anxieties provoked by the rise of individualism and selfhood in modern culture. Paying special attention to Rousseau, Freud, and Proust, Brooks also looks at the intersection of individual life stories with the law, and considers the creation of an introspective project that culminates in psychoanalysis.
Elegant and provocative, Enigmas of Identity offers new insights into the questions and clues about who we think we are.
Endorsements
“An extremely provocative exploration of the myriad complexities of the act of investigating identity, both as a conceptual category and as a lived and perceived phenomenon. I found especially useful Brooks’s emphasis on a crucial paradox: one identity does the investigating while the other is investigated, and yet both are ostensibly part of the same entity.”–David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
“Peter Brooks’s Enigmas of Identity is a tour de force of dazzling erudition and insight drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature and cultural history. It is so gripping that one would like to read it in one sitting, but soon realizes that it demands thoughtful study and reflection.”–Louis Begley, author of Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters
“Focusing on unexpected aspects of a familiar subject (masturbation, imposture), considering a wide range of modern texts in several languages (Balzac, Freud, Sherlock Holmes, some fascinating law cases), and writing in supple prose, Peter Brooks has crafted in Enigmas of Identity a provocative and always engaging study of the importance and the meanings of identity for literary accomplishment.”–Patricia Meyer Spacks, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English Emerita, University of Virginia
“Peter Brooks has written a splendid meditation on the search for the self: erudite, illuminating, and eloquent. He shows how this search leads to an obsessive focus on markers of identity and stories of imposture. Rousseau, Balzac, Stendhal, Proust, and Freud are central interlocutors, but Brooks makes reference to a wide range of other texts, and deftly weaves developments in U.S. law into his discussion.”–Martha C. Nussbaum, author of Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
“Enigmas of Identity is an inviting guided tour through the literary and legal contours of the ‘identity paradigm’ of modernity. Peter Brooks takes new directions on a topic that will interest literary and legal scholars as well as psychologists and philosophers. Moving skillfully from legal decisions to literary texts, he offers many interpretive gems along the way.”–Eric Slauter, University of Chicago
About the Author
Peter Brooks is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar at Princeton University. He is the author of many works of literary criticism, including Henry James Goes to Paris (Princeton), Reading for the Plot, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, and Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. He is also the author of two novels, The Emperor’s Body and World Elsewhere.
Table of Contents
To Begin 1 [PDF]
Chapter 1. Marks of Identity 10
Chapter 2. Egotisms 35
Chapter 3. The “Outcast of the Universe”? 60
Chapter 4. Discovering the Self in Self-Pleasuring 92
Chapter 5. “Inevitable Discovery”: Searches, Narrative, Identity 117
Chapter 6. The Derealization of Self 147
Chapter 7. The Madness of Art 170
Epilogue: The Identity Paradigm 195
Acknowledgments 199
Notes 201
Index 217
Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization, and Economic Growth in China. By Dan Breznitz & Michael Murphree
Run of the Red Queen: Government, Innovation, Globalization, and Economic Growth in China. By Dan Breznitz & Michael Murphree. Yale University Press 2011. ISBN: 030015271X; 9780300152715.
Few observers are unimpressed by the economic ambition of China or by the nation’s remarkable rate of growth. But what does the future hold? This meticulously researched book closely examines the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese economic system to discover where the nation may be headed and what the Chinese experience reveals about emerging market economies. The authors find that contrary to popular belief, cutting edge innovation is not a prerequisite for sustained economic vitality—and that China is a perfect case in point.
Dan Breznitz is an associate professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the College of Management, and an associate professor by courtesy at the School of Public Policy at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is author of the award-winning book Innovation and the State, published by Yale University Press, and a Sloan Foundation Industry Studies Fellow. He lives in Atlanta. Michael Murphree is a project coordinator at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He lives in Atlanta.
Read More →
Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Harvard Contemporary China)
Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Harvard Contemporary China), by Sebastian Heilmann (Editor), Elizabeth J. Perry (Editor), Jae Ho Chung (Contributor), Nara Dillon (Contributor), Joseph Fewsmith (Contributor), Benjamin L. Liebman (Contributor), Patricia M. Thornton (Contributor), Shaoguang Wang (Contributor), Yuezhi Zhao (Contributor). Harvard University Asia Center, 2011. ISBN-10: 0674060636; ISBN-13: 978-0674060630
Observers have been predicting the demise of China’s political system since Mao Zedong’s death over thirty years ago. The Chinese Communist state, however, seems to have become increasingly adept at responding to challenges ranging from leadership succession and popular unrest to administrative reorganization, legal institutionalization, and global economic integration. What political techniques and procedures have Chinese policymakers employed to manage the unsettling impact of the fastest sustained economic expansion in world history?
As the authors of these essays demonstrate, China’s political system allows for more diverse and flexible input than would be predicted from its formal structures. Many contemporary methods of governance have their roots in techniques of policy generation and implementation dating to the revolution and early PRC—techniques that emphasize continual experimentation. China’s long revolution had given rise to this guerrilla-style decisionmaking as a way of dealing creatively with pervasive uncertainty. Thus, even in a post-revolutionary PRC, the invisible hand of Chairman Mao—tamed, tweaked, and transformed—plays an important role in China’s adaptive governance.
Read More →
The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version: Fully Revised & Updated. Hardcover
The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version: Fully Revised & Updated [Hardcover]
Harold W. Attridge (Author), Society Of Biblical Literature (Author)
HarperOne (2006). ISBN-10: 006078685X; ISBN-13: 9780060786854
The landmark general reference Bible that offers the full text of the New Revised Standard Version, now completely revised and updated by leading biblical scholars, including, new introductions and notes, diagrams, charts and maps––25% revised or new material.
After 10 years of new archeological discoveries and changes in biblical studies, it was time for an overhaul of this classic reference work.
With the guidance of the Society of Biblical Literature, an organization of the best biblical scholars world wide, we have selected Dean of Yale Divinity School, Harold Attridge, to oversee the Study Bible’s updating and revision.
Read More →
