This Week In Books: #20

[akujunkan]

I should really think of a better, cleverer name for these things. In the meantime, I have two books for you.

1) The Wisdom Of Insecurity - Alan Watts
I first picked up this short book four years ago in Japan. It's still as interesting now as it was then--a nice, thought-provoking discussion of such questions as the natures of consciousness, faith, and reality. Watts deals with these big questions in a surprisingly lucid manner, avoiding the convoluted explanations into which many philosophers fall. My only caveat with this volume is that, like many other contemporary works inspired by Eastern philosophy, Insecurity does spend some time on various subjects--Communism, psychoanalysis, and the assumption that readers share and ascribe to a 1950s Judeo-Christian worldview--which no longer have much relevance today. But at a mere 160 pages it's still well worth the read, regardless.

2) Wild Swans - Jung Chang
I spent most of the week with this behemoth, which is a suprisingly solid and engaging read. Wild Swans follows the lives of three generations of women from early 20th Century China to Deng Xiaoping's¹ ascension to the leadership of the country upon Mao's death. Through various combinations of birth, marriage, and government connections, all three generations of women were relatively-to-highly well off, yet each went through an enormous amount of hardship as well, which, although unfortunate, prevents the narrative from being an exercise in socially priveleged navel gazing. Jung's retelling of her and her ancestors' lives is sensitive and attentive to detail; she also provides a good deal of background information (making this more than a dull exercise in history), and usually acknowledges the various benefits which have accrued to her throughout life in comparison to her fellow citizens, creating a window into conditions across many different strata of society (and also preventing her from seeming obnoxiously unobservant or self-absorbed). Best of all, this book made immediate the horrors of the Japanese occupation, civil war, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution and their attendant purges and persecutions in a way that university lectures and bona fide history books hadn't. For that reason alone, I recommend reading it.

¹I should probably smacked for this, but doesn't this picture make him look like an asian Robin Williams?


That will be all.

Comments

[dark-waterlily.livejournal.com]

but doesn't this picture make him look like an asian Robin Williams?
XD