TWIB-III: 22
Mar. 16th, 2009 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanI read two books this week, one that wasn't so hot and one that I will most likely purchase at the next available opportunity.
1) The Tulip – Anna Pavord
Judging by its engaging introduction, The Tulip could have been a really good book. Unfortunately, it quickly degenerates into a stultifyingly lifeless slog through a laundry list of tulip varieties and tulip aficionados across four centuries. There are only twelve color plates for 268 pages of text, and as Pavord does not indicate to what portions of the text the plates refer, they are nearly useless.
Pavord may have penned six other books prior to The Tulip, but she is no historian. The text is badly organised, highly repetitive, and lacks the necessary context or structure to put the flower’s development into a historical perspective. Indeed, it reads like nothing so much as a shallow Cliff’s Notes of the sources Pavord lists in her bibliography. It also includes several pages of untranslated French that reek of pretension given the fact that Pavord obtained English translations for all the other non-English sources she quoted in the book. Pavord must have had an audience in mind when she penned The Tulip, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out who it was, and I doubt all but the most completist of readers will be able to make it through to the end.
2) The International Relations of Northeast Asia – Samuel S. Kim (ed)
Oh man, what an excellent book. This is what I have been missing from Japanese graduate instruction – academically rigorous, objective, precisely written examinations of the political, security, and economic issues facing Northeast Asia. Although the volume was published in 2004, the vast majority of its content is still germane today. Although it does suffer from some of the familiar problems that plague most East Asian scholarship (e.g. does “East Asian” include Southeast Asia or not? How should one consider the American and Russian roles in the region?), this is more than balanced by the depth and scope of its individual chapters. Anyone with an interest in East or Southeast Asia, or any of the individual countries within the region should check this book out.
That will be all.
1) The Tulip – Anna Pavord
Judging by its engaging introduction, The Tulip could have been a really good book. Unfortunately, it quickly degenerates into a stultifyingly lifeless slog through a laundry list of tulip varieties and tulip aficionados across four centuries. There are only twelve color plates for 268 pages of text, and as Pavord does not indicate to what portions of the text the plates refer, they are nearly useless.
Pavord may have penned six other books prior to The Tulip, but she is no historian. The text is badly organised, highly repetitive, and lacks the necessary context or structure to put the flower’s development into a historical perspective. Indeed, it reads like nothing so much as a shallow Cliff’s Notes of the sources Pavord lists in her bibliography. It also includes several pages of untranslated French that reek of pretension given the fact that Pavord obtained English translations for all the other non-English sources she quoted in the book. Pavord must have had an audience in mind when she penned The Tulip, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out who it was, and I doubt all but the most completist of readers will be able to make it through to the end.
2) The International Relations of Northeast Asia – Samuel S. Kim (ed)
Oh man, what an excellent book. This is what I have been missing from Japanese graduate instruction – academically rigorous, objective, precisely written examinations of the political, security, and economic issues facing Northeast Asia. Although the volume was published in 2004, the vast majority of its content is still germane today. Although it does suffer from some of the familiar problems that plague most East Asian scholarship (e.g. does “East Asian” include Southeast Asia or not? How should one consider the American and Russian roles in the region?), this is more than balanced by the depth and scope of its individual chapters. Anyone with an interest in East or Southeast Asia, or any of the individual countries within the region should check this book out.
That will be all.