Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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A fantastic and fantastically concise look at intellectual thought in China about the country’s economic and political development and their implications for the future of the country and the world.

Learn more about "What Does China Think?"

Posted at 7:31 PM · Comments (0)

Deeply impressive tales from China’s underbelly.
I’m working on a full-blown review of this now.

Learn more about "The Corpse Walker"

Posted at 2:39 PM · Comments (0)

An odd book in the positive sense that it follows the rules of no particular genre. Instead, it manages to be deeply thoughtful, keenly observed and both learned and person. Beautifully written, too.

Learn more about "The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama"

Posted at 2:36 PM · Comments (0)

I put off reading this for a long time, basically because of too many other interests competing for my time, and because of a native distrust of hype.
Having tucked into it the other day and quickly finding myself unable to put it down, I must say, however, that that this is one of the most astonishingly well-written - meaning both stylistically limpid and honest - memoirs I have come across for a very long time.
I’ll add some favorite excerpts here shortly.

Learn more about "Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance"

Posted at 12:38 PM · Comments (0)

Naipaul treats the world to his very special acid bath.

“I travel to discover other states of mind. An if for this intellectual adventure I go to places where people live restricted lives, it is because my curiosity is still dictated in part by my colonial Trinidad background. I go to places which, however alien, connect in some way with what I already know. When my curiosity has been satisfied, when there are no more surprises, the intellectual adventure is over and I become anxious to leave.

It is a writer’s curiosity rather than an ethnographer’s or a journalist’s. So while, when I travel, I can move only according to what I find, I also live, as it were, in a novel of my own making, moving from not knowing to knowing, with person interweaving with person and incident opening out into incident. The intellectual adventure is also a human one: I can move only according to my sympathy. I don’t force anything; there is no spokesman I have to see, no one I absolutely must interview. The kind of understanding I am looking for comes best through people I get to like….”

Learn more about "The Writer and the World"

Posted at 1:19 PM · Comments (0)

An excellent primer on China, the weight of its past on its future and the country’s place in the world’s future. It has the merit of being brief and tightly focused and draws on a rich personal experience of the country. I’ve read too many recent China books, and this one stands out from the crowd.

Learn more about "Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century"

Posted at 11:30 AM · Comments (0)

Top of the pile of a slew of a books and recordings I’ve recently received. They were things long delayed somehow in the transit from the US.
This a collection of articles of the great and hard-to-classify author, Martha Gellhorn. I was drawn to her work from a little snippet of her extraordinary correspondence with Hemingway that appeared in Harpers last year, which I read on a fast train from Berlin to Frankfurt, where I attended the book fair. (I believe a sample is archived here somewhere.) Brilliant, brilliant stuff.

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Learn more about "The View from the Ground"

Posted at 7:42 PM · Comments (0)

An old classic I read in college days.

When the person who knew the departed personally and by name also dies, then the former passes out of the horizon of the Sasa period; and in effect he now becomes completely dead as far as the family ties are concerned. He has sunk into the Zamani period. But while the departed person is remembered by name, he is not really dead; he is alive, and such a person I would call the living dead….

There is a terrific discussion here about the concept of time, the difficulty of conceiving of the future in the way we usually think of the future, and the implications for governance.

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Learn more about "African Religions and Philosphy"

Posted at 3:05 PM · Comments (0)

Every now and then I’ll read a book that fills me very powerfully with regret - regret that I had not read it earlier. This is one such book.
I read a ton of books about China and about Shanghai when I first moved here, so many that most of them began to run together in a blur.
This account of the rise of Shanghai, the place where I’ve lived for 4 1/2 years and the subject of my most important photography project to date is a compelling and informative read that’s both well researched and written in sturdy, serviceable prose. I’ve had moments of fun with it, and I’ve learned a lot.

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Learn more about "Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City"

Posted at 2:53 PM · Comments (0)

An excerpt:
“An enlightened society has some means, public or private, to support its artists, because their work is regarded as a spiritual triumph, and a claim to greatness for the entire tribe. But mere epicures would hardly achieve such fame.Even chef, perfumers, and upholsterers, who produce the means of sensory pleasure for others, are not rated as the torchbearers of culture and inspired creators. Only their own advertisements bestow such titles on them. If music, patterned sound, had no other office than to stimulate and soothe our nerves, pleasing our ears as well-combined foods please our palates, might be highly popular, but never culturally important. Its historic development would be too trivial a subject to engage many people in lifelong study, though a few desperate Ph.D these mught be wrung from its anecdotal past under the rubric of “social history.” And music conservatories would be properly rates exactly like cooking schools.

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Learn more about "Feeling and Form"

Posted at 9:43 PM · Comments (0)

An absolutely stunning short novel by Graham Greene. It had been sitting on my bookshelf unread for years until one day recently it somehow beckoned to me. I read it totally unprepared for its powers of observation about social life in London at the war’s end, but especially and above all for the penetrating way he catalogs and dissects, stage by stage, the emotions that attend romantic separation.

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Learn more about "The End of the Affair"

Posted at 10:38 PM · Comments (0)

A very solid and competent survey of how China is governed today and what the world looks like from the seat of power in Beijing. Subtitles in books can be the most unreliable of things. This one is worthy of the content.

Learn more about "China: Fragile Superpower: How China’s Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise"

Posted at 11:46 PM · Comments (0)

I was sent a pre-publication copy of this memoir by John Nathan, the author and translator, and have enjoyed it immensely. It mostly deals with life at the center of the arts and intellectual scene in Tokyo (and elsewhere) in the 1960s. Look for it to come out very soon from Simon and Schuster.
Nathan has written a beautiful and intimate account of his charmed, often self-absorbed and sometimes lonely life round-tripping between Japan and the United States, and one reads it marveling at how he was able to changing metiers almost by the season and always regain his footing.

Learn more about "Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere"

Posted at 2:32 PM · Comments (0)

I confess I haven’t finished this yet. Indeed I have only recently begun (it’s 614 pages). But this book bursts out of the gate with some of the most muscular and memorable prose I’ve encountered in recent fiction.
It’s the death of JFK, the horror of the Vietnam war, no, the horror of random violence.
The hype surrounding this book is warranted. More about it once I’ve finished. Meanwhile, Tree of Smoke is very highly recommended.

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Learn more about "Tree of Smoke"

Posted at 10:18 AM · Comments (0)

I could begin and end this with one word: delightful.

There is a wonderful dream like quality to this memoir, a dream with the kind of clarity and detail that we often yearn for but seldom attain. Kapuscinski anticipated magic realism, and continues in that vein to the end. There may nothing utterly reliable in the whole text, but its innocence and enthusiasm for life is rare. The conceit of linking his life with that of Herodotus, too, is a stroke of genius. Highly recommended.

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Learn more about "Travels with Herodotus"

Posted at 12:40 PM · Comments (0)

This is perhaps the most beautifully produced book of photography ever sold. It’s not my genre, and I bought it despite second thoughts that a book of images of rocks could really hold my interest in a lasting way.
The book arrived and the doubts have been vanquished. The rocks are rendered with a beauty that equals the very best of abstract impressionism, and indeed often surpasses it.
The short essays on each counter page are also quite stunning.

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Learn more about "Within the Stone"

Posted at 12:22 PM · Comments (0)

I am just getting around to reading Coetzee for the first time. Sat down with this novel at lunch, and read half of it in one go. It’s slim, don’t worry, but it’s also got a subterranean pull that made it almost impossible to put aside. How often do you find literature like that? Not often enough, that’s for sure.
Coetzee draws you into the life of a middle aged college professor, a lonely divorcee who loves women and begins making a series of fatefully bad decisions involving them. I’ll leave it that. Someone blurbed the book likening Coetzee to Camus. I scoffed. That’s still a pretty tall order, but even after a couple of chapters you know you are in that realm.

Learn more about "Disgrace"

Posted at 2:07 AM · Comments (1)

I’ve been taking this collection with me to lunch for the last week, and what a great companion it is. I’d read some of the stories years ago, in the original, but the pleasure upon rediscovery is unalloyed.
A particular favorite is “The Graveyard Sisterhood.” Wow!

Learn more about "Selected Short Stories"

Posted at 4:40 PM · Comments (0)

Coming around a bit late to this one, a deserved clasic about the outbreak of war in Shanghai, and aftermath in the life of a young British boy. Reading this puts me in the mood to take Shanghai street pictures. Very effective writing.

Learn more about "Empire of the Sun"

Posted at 12:11 PM · Comments (0)

Occasionally glib, more often vigorous, though. A quick, tidy and strongly argued brief for economic (and other sorts of) freedom.

Learn more about "In Defense of Global Capitalism"

Posted at 12:03 PM · Comments (0)

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