(As of June 2017, CCLaP is selling a first edition, first printing of this book at our eBay store. Below is the write-up that accompanied the auction(As of June 2017, CCLaP is selling a first edition, first printing of this book at our eBay store. Below is the write-up that accompanied the auction listing there.)
So why should a serious book collector pay any attention to a volume that's less than ten years old, by an author who has otherwise not proven that she has any lasting power within the literary industry? Because Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love may in fact turn out to be the absolute perfect book to chronicle for future historians exactly what it was like to be a middle-class white suburban American female in the years following 9/11, a period that is bound to become a point of obsession for those in the future studying the US's rise and fall as a global superpower. A reluctant suburbanite who had just gone through a bitter divorce, the mid-thirties Gilbert found herself in the early 2000s mentally adrift, a confessed "self-help junkie" who was trying every gimmicky piece of advice that landed her way, being force-fed a diet of anti-depressive medication against her wishes but too afraid of the alternative to stop them. Within such a moment of mid-life crisis, then, she made the radical decision to sell all her things, get rid of her New York apartment, and spend a year doing nothing but traveling to what she called the "three I's" -- Italy (to indulge a random desire to learn the language), India (to delve more seriously into her recent conversion to Hinduism), and Indonesia (specifically to Bali, to spend four months as the personal assistant to a "village elder" she previously met during her job as a globe-trotting magazine journalist).
The results of this year-long trek are charming and infectious, and it's no surprise that the book remained on the NYT bestseller list for a whopping 187 weeks straight, later made into a high-profile movie produced by Brad Pitt and starring Julia Roberts. And that's because Gilbert cuts through the usual "chick-lit" filler here, having the courage to take a cruelly hard look at her mistakes and her weaknesses, and showing how spending a year letting go of every expectation she had had about life was ironically the best thing she could've ever done for that life. It's a call for simplicity, spirituality and anti-materialism that resonated profoundly with tens of millions of women in the same position as her, which says a lot about the point of runaway consumerism and moral bankruptcy the US had reached by the beginning of the 21st century; and it doesn't hurt that the book is also laugh-out-loud funny at points, moving sometimes to the point of tears, and just so happens to hit all the usual beats of a typical romantic comedy but this time in real life. A perfect gift for a fan of the book who wants to have a closer relationship with the original text, this first printing in flawless condition is being offered at a price specifically for young beginning collectors, those looking to add important titles to their library now when no one else is thinking of them, to ripen and age like a fine wine into the valuable commodities they'll one day be. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Unbeknownst to readers of this blog, I've been spending this summer tearing through a bunch of books on Buddhism and especially Buddhist meditation; I've started practicing a secular form of meditation in my personal life over the last year, and the insights I've had about my life because of it was recently referred to by a friend as "accidentally Buddhist" in nature, so I thought it'd be interesting to learn a little more about actual Buddhism and to see why my friend made this comment in the first place. The books have generally been hit-and-miss, the natural side-effect of just grabbing a bunch of random titles off the shelf of my neighborhood library; but one of the best writers on the subject of Buddhism in America has turned out to be a local, Columbia College professor Stephen Asma who takes a decidedly blue-collar, rationalist, and no-bullshit approach to his interpretations of these ancient texts, and how they can be applied to the practical lives of contemporary Westerners, without needing all the hippie New Age accoutrements that have typically been carried with them into our country. And thus have I ended up making my way this summer through nearly the entirety of Asma's oeuvre, from practical guides to meditation to a "for dummies" style introduction to the philosophy.
His latest that I've read, though, 2005's The Gods Drink Whiskey, I thought was finally the kind of book that could be justified writing about here at the blog for a general audience; and that's because this is not just a hyper-specialized guide to Buddhism itself, but a sprawling and fascinating look at a year Asma spent in southeast Asia (headquartered in Cambodia but traveling extensively through the rest of the region), where he blends lessons about religion and philosophy with an engaging travelogue, a primer on the politics of these developing nations, and an astute sociological look at how Buddhism has been warped and changed by various local populations in order to fit what they've needed to get out of it. And indeed, by constantly comparing this process to the one Christianity has gone through in the Western world (think of prim Mormons in their Sunday finest, snake handlers in Texas, suburban liberals in New England, and Midwestern fundamentalists flailing about and speaking in tongues, all of whom are supposedly worshipping the same Jesus), Asma makes it easy to understand why there's so many different forms of Buddhism in southeast Asia, why they've been so influenced by the local culture of each area, and why there's so much disagreement between different sects over how to "properly" practice. (Just for one example, and probably the biggest surprise to Americans in the entire book, the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism only comprises six percent of all practicing Buddhists worldwide, and is considered by most Buddhists to be an overly fussy, overly ritualistic form of the philosophy that relies way too heavily on mysticism and supernatural elements.)
All this would be interesting enough; but like I said, what makes this book truly spectacular is the way Asma weaves in his personal anecdotes about his travels there, and especially the ironic surrealism of being one of the most experienced veterans at the Cambodian Buddhist Institute where he was hired to teach, which is what brought him over there in the first place. (Although Cambodia is one of the nations where Buddhism was first cultivated thousands of years ago, the monstrous Pol Pot dictatorship of the 1960s and '70s systematically murdered nearly an entire generation of Buddhist teachers and practitioners, leaving an all-consuming gap in expertise after that radical Communist regime was defeated that has forced the nation to do things like hire Americans to come and teach their newest generation of Buddhist youths.) A funny, moving, eye-opening and always informative book, despite this now being a decade old it turned out to be one of the most illuminating and enjoyable travel journals I've read in years, which is why I wanted to do a writeup of it here for the main blog and not just my usual quick mention at Goodreads.com, like I've been doing with all the other Buddhism books I've been reading this summer. It comes very strongly recommended, as does Asma's other books, to anyone looking to get a better sense of what Buddhism is all about as a practical, secular philosophy, apart from the spiritual trappings it's picked up along the way from the various regional communities who have adopted it over the centuries. ...more
For those who need catching up, I'm spending the summer reading a bunch of random books from my local library on the subject of Buddhist meditation, aFor those who need catching up, I'm spending the summer reading a bunch of random books from my local library on the subject of Buddhist meditation, after starting a secular form of meditation in my own life and having a friend recently remark that my insights about the practice sounded "accidentally Buddhist" to them. (See my review of Start Here Now for the entire backstory.)
This is one of the last books of the reading project -- I've burned through about ten of them now, and I suspect I won't find any other books in other library branches that will be too fundamentally different than the ones I read at mine -- which makes it ironic that this turned out to be the best out of all of them, or at least "best" when it comes to my specific personal goal of finding a book about Buddhism that approaches it from a decidedly secular standpoint that's friendly to atheists like me, and that uses the everyday language and vernacular of contemporary Americans instead of drowning itself in hard-to-pronounce foreign terms from thousands of years ago. A blue-collar Chicagoan professor at Columbia College who unapologetically eats red meat and drinks liquor on a regular basis, Asma in fact seemingly wrote his book specifically with someone like me in mind, a refreshingly down-to-earth look at the philosophical real-world underpinnings behind so many of the most famous concepts in Buddhism, deliberately written with an eye towards how it can practically help in the day-to-day lives of most ordinary people, regardless of whether they're ready to convert to Buddhism or even really have much of a spiritual bent at all.
This really helped me understand the self-directed insights I've been having this year, after starting to apply daily bouts of mindfulness and "gratitude journaling" into my life (after first learning them in the computer-programming bootcamp I attended last year, of all places); and it's been enlightening (so to speak) to realize that just the natural things I've been noticing about the world and myself because of these new activities actually have deep roots in the very heart of what Buddhism is supposed to be about. This especially applies to what's turned out to be the most beneficial thing that's come out of my mindfulness experiments, the way it helps stabilize my mood and keeps me on an even emotional track no matter how particularly bad or good that particular day went for me; and out of all the books I've read this summer on the subject, Asma was the only one to share a well-known simile about this (the "Six Animals" simile from the Samyutta Nikaya, discussed on page 125 in Asma's book) that made the entire subject just immediately sort of click into deep understanding in my brain.
Although there are of course better books out there for people seeking other things from Buddhist writings than me, I can honestly say that this was the best one specifically for those like me who are not particularly religious, who cast a skeptical eye towards all the New Age hippie baggage that usually come with American Buddhism, and who mostly want to understand this subject in terms of how it can affect just their normal, day-to-day lives out in the secular world. I'm grateful to have finally found a book like this before my summer reading project ended, and it comes strongly recommended to the kinds of people I just described. ...more
To get people caught up who need it, I'm spending this summer reading a bunch of random books from my local library on Buddhism and meditation, ever sTo get people caught up who need it, I'm spending this summer reading a bunch of random books from my local library on Buddhism and meditation, ever since starting to practice a secular form of meditation in the last year and recently having a friend remark that my insights about it sounded "surprisingly Buddhist." (See my review of Start Here Now for the full backstory.) That book wasn't so bad, because it was authored by a middle-aged American who only came to Buddhism later in life, and so is written in a plain-spoken style that sounds natural to American ears; but Thich Nhat Hanh, author of today's You Are Here, is an elderly Vietnamese man who's been hardcore into Buddhism since he was a little kid, so his book sounds exactly like you would expect from such an author, containing advice such as to call ourselves "little dear one" when feeling down about ourselves, or to audibly laugh out loud while pouring tea as we exclaim, "I'm pouring tea! I'm pouring tea!" It's cute to picture some wrinkled old Asian man in monk's robes engaging in such behavior, but it's going to seem pretty ludicrous to most random Americans to do so themselves, one of many, many aspects of "Buddhism in practice" versus "Buddhism in theory" that turns so many people off from gleaning what could be some very practical secular life advice that is wrapped within all the rituals and foreign phrases and silly behavior. And of course it doesn't help that Hanh writes in a circular style that tends to repeat the same basic points over and over again, such as this pretty typical example right on page 31:
To be truly here, we have to bring the body back to the mind and the mind back to the body. We have to bring about what is called the unity of body and mind. This is very important in Buddhist meditation. Often, the body and mind go in different directions, and so we are not fully here. Therefore, we have to do what is necessary for them to come back together again.
Ugh, okay, I get it, we have to unite the body and mind! This example is the problem with the entire book in a nutshell, in terms of being just some secular American attempting to learn more about what Buddhist meditation is all about -- Hanh never writes a simple sentence when an entire paragraph of similarly worded simple sentences can be written instead, then does so in a way that makes him sound like that weirdo at the park who all the hippies gaze longingly at while beating on their tabors during their Saturday Drum Circle And Vegan Potluck. I've learned enough about Buddhism now to know that there's all kinds of interesting philosophical lessons to be learned from it, no matter what your particular spiritual leanings or tolerance level for New Age babble; so it's too bad there's so few books on the market that actually cut through this chakra chattel and present such lessons in the kind of casual, stripped-down vernacular that most Americans actually speak in the 2010s. This book is definitely not that, and I suspect will only be of use to existing Buddhists who are already used to this kind of way of speaking, a big reason why it's so hard for me to fully embrace something like Buddhism in the first place. ...more
As part of a big transformation that's been going on in my life over the last year and a half (including going back to school last year at the age ofAs part of a big transformation that's been going on in my life over the last year and a half (including going back to school last year at the age of 47, so to completely change what I do for a day job), I have started adding several new-agey-sounding things to my regular routine, including now seeing a therapist twice a month, practicing "radical empathy" towards people who piss me off, and doing a daily "gratitude journal" as well as meditating, albeit a completely secular, atheistic form of meditation that's much more akin to medical health advice than to spiritualism. But after recently sharing my insights with a friend about what I've been learning from these new activities, and having that friend remark that it sounded "surprisingly Buddhist," I thought it might be worth it to pick up a handful of completely random books on Buddhist meditation from my local library, just to see what they were talking about and whether it really does jibe with what I've been learning from my secular explorations of meditation (more commonly referred to by us non-religious types as "mindfulness").
This is the first one I read, by a media-savvy Buddhist who's been on Oprah among many other places, and who apparently runs the largest online mindfulness community on the planet, and I have to say it was pretty good; a systematic look at meditation for complete beginners, the eye-rolling language of so many of these kinds of books is kept to a minimum here, with Piver instead talking in a casually conversational and non-pretentious tone about both the "high concepts" of meditation (like the history of Buddhism, its various schools of thought, and how these differing schools will affect the way you meditate based on which you follow), and about the nitty-gritty stuff like literally how you should hold your body while meditating, how long you should do it, what it might mean if you keep falling asleep in the middle of sessions, and a lot more.
Now, that said, despite Piver insisting that Buddhist meditation is not a "religious practice," it's hard to discuss Buddhism without bringing a lot of spirituality into it, the part of all this stuff that as an atheist always goes south for me; and I have to confess, I also didn't care for the parts about building a little shrine where you meditate, starting your sessions with a "request to the universe for blessings," or any of that other stuff that to my humanist ears starts sounding an awful lot like a Portlandia comedy sketch. Ultimately I like to think of my meditation practice as simply another self-directed step towards better health, much like how I switched several years ago to an all "Mediterranean Diet" eating plan; and just as I'm not actually a North African even though I now often eat like one, I also feel like I can learn beneficial things from Buddhism even while not actually being a Buddhist (specifically in this case, realizing that when I told my friend how meditation has been great for separating whether I feel good or bad about myself on any given day away from any good or bad things that actually happened to me that day, I was pretty much accidentally repeating what Buddhists have to say about non-attachment to suffering). So in that sense, this was a quite worthwhile read, and it's recommended for others who are interested in meditation whether or not they're interested in becoming Buddhists as well. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Although there's nothing particularly outstanding about Mike Robbins' The Nine Horizons, travel fans will want to pick up a copy anyway, simply because it's such a solid and strong example of a classic travelogue based on real experiences. Split into nine chapters detailing nine trips the British author made throughout the 1980s and '90s, this has the formal tone of an older travel writer like George Orwell, a certain primness to the proceedings that helps keep the sometimes outrageous stories about exotic locations in check; and I must admit, it's fascinating to read so long after the fact Robbins' political observations about certain areas of the world that were once hotbeds twenty or thirty years ago but no longer are (or are sometimes hot again for entirely different reasons, like his entertaining account of a pre-Arab-Spring Syria). Although not a genre-crossing "must read" even for people who don't particularly like travelogues, it certainly should go in your to-be-read list if you are, an illuminating and well-done series of vignettes that kept me quickly turning pages until I was done.
Out of 10: 8.3, or 9.3 for fans of travel writing ...more
I have to admit, while I was reading Giacomo Lee's Funereal recently, it actually reminded me a lot of a book that CCLaP itself published a couple of I have to admit, while I was reading Giacomo Lee's Funereal recently, it actually reminded me a lot of a book that CCLaP itself published a couple of years ago, Scott Abrahams' Turtle and Dam; not because of any plot similarities (to be clear, the books have very different storylines), but because they're both great examples of white Westerners writing convincingly about young people in contemporary Asia, with Lee's particular story taking place in right-this-second South Korea (or just "Korea" as it's known in the book, an early sign that we are now looking at this country from the standpoint of a local instead of a foreign visitor).
One of those books that seems to touch on every single thing about Asian culture we Americans find strange, at its heart it's the tale of mid-twenties slacker Soobin Shin, a wannabe indie-rock musician and unemployed marketing major currently working at a doughnut shop in a neighborhood in Seoul known specifically for all its plastic surgeons; the story really takes off when she discovers that one of their regular slovenly customers has just started a new business dedicated to "radical psychotherapy," in which despondent and suicidal clients are given an actual funeral with their actual friends in attendance, and where they lie in an actual coffin for hours at a time, under the belief that it will help them understand the true joys of life without the family shame of seeing an actual psychologist.
This is the ingenious joy of this book in a nutshell -- that this odd little detail helps us understand just what a shameful thing it still is in Korea to admit that one is seeing a medical therapist -- and essentially this entire novel is 228 pages of that, strange little stories about Soobin's surreal life as the new marketing director of "OneLife," which each serve as another way for us as Westerners to examine such bizarre (in our eyes) Asian phenomenon as K-pop, doomsday cults, love hotels, sexual submissiveness in corporate culture, karaoke bars as "brothel lite"s, and a lot more. A book that just almost dips into science-fiction at times, although still feeling like we're simply getting a glimpse at the ultra-cutting-edge elements of Korean life that most of us just don't know about, there's a good reason that Lee is getting compared left and right these days to people like David Mitchell and William Gibson (and has become the latest obsession of the brilliantly weird geniuses at Boing Boing, no small feat); and Funereal comes strongly recommended to those who are specifically into these kinds of stories, and especially those who want to understand hipster Asia better precisely through the weird little details that make it seem like some bizarro genre story.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
This book declares right in its subtitle that it's about the journey Marco Polo took from Italy to China back in the Medieval Age, becoming essentially the very first white person in history to give a written account to Europeans of the Far East, but that turns out to be not quite true; only half of this relatively slim book is about that, with the entire second half being a detailed archeological and anthropological guide to emperor Kublai Khan, his summer imperial city Xanadu, and other such details about ancient China that don't really have much to do with Polo or his journey at all. As such, then, although the book itself is certainly well-done, it's still getting some points knocked off today, merely because of false advertising; for I wanted to know a lot more about Polo and his journey itself, the whole reason I picked up this book, while the account given here is not much more than an extra-long Wikipedia entry, a disappointing realization for a book that promotes itself as a 350-page guide to the actual trip. Buyer beware.
Out of 10: 8.0
UPDATE: After a visit to Wikipedia, I've come to learn that Man himself originally titled this book Xanadu, giving a much clearer indication of its contents; but that when HarperCollins acquired it, they were the ones who changed it to Marco Polo: The Journey That Changed the World, so that they could release it at the same time as the Marco Polo Netflix series and pick up some cheap publicity. Shame on you, HarperCollins....more
(DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the publishing company that published this book.)
The CCLaP train continues running at full steam right now, and I'm hap(DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the publishing company that published this book.)
The CCLaP train continues running at full steam right now, and I'm happy to announce our upcoming November release, the hilarious yet deeply sobering dysfunctional-family comedy "The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong" by Brooklyn author Leland Cheuk. A black comedy about family relationships in the style of Jonathan Franzen, it's also an examination of all the real abuses that Asian-Americans have had to endure over the last 200 years, from the railroad-building days of the Victorian Age to the forced settlement camps of World War Two, all of the events seen through the eyes of a series of patriarchs of the terminally doomed Pong family over the generations. At heart a serious look at racial injustices, you nonetheless won't believe how much you'll be laughing all the way through it, with the popular podcaster Cheuk bringing his trademarked left turns and unexpected developments to this full-length literary debut.
As always with CCLaP, we're making the ebook version of "Pong" AVAILABLE FOR FREE TO ANY GOODREADS MEMBER WHO WANTS ONE, so to express an interest just drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com or simply send me a message through Goodreads. Word-of-mouth is the number-one way we generate new customers, so your mention of this book here can and does have a huge impact on the total number of copies we eventually sell. The book comes out to the general public on November 16th, but the advance review copy is available as we speak, so don't hesitate to drop me a line if you'd like to read a free sneak-preview copy of this darkly funny, thought-provoking novel!...more
[Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com). I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C[Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com). I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.]
There's a common cliché in the world of the literary arts, that says that authors are essentially on a ticking clock of slipping quality that is intricately tied to their age; in other words, that writers are at their most creative at the beginning of their careers, typically when they're young and fresh and haven't actually written out every idea yet that they have in their brain, while by the end of that career they are typically doing not much else than rehashing old concepts and coasting on their reputation as a revered veteran. And unfortunately there's not much better example of this than the Japanese surrealist titan Haruki Murakami, who just turned 65 this year and has now put out close to twenty books; for while I was as big a fan as everyone else during his '80s heyday of such classics as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (still to this day the best novel he's ever written), I have to admit that I've been intensely disappointed by the last three books in a row he's published, not just 2007's After Dark (a.k.a. "Murakami Lite") and 2011's career nadir 1Q84 (what will undoubtedly go down as one of the most overhyped novels of the entire 21st century), but now also his new Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which feels like a book he was excited about starting but then completely lost interest in about halfway through.
A book riddled with the usual Murakami touches (an obsession with Western classical music, a young Japanese male narrator who prefers coffee over tea, a romantic interest with distinctive ears, references to evil spirits who haunt our dreams, etc), Colorless nonetheless starts out looking like something we rarely get from the author, which is a deep character study grounded in the real world with only a light plot skeleton holding it together; it's the story of our eponymous hero, who as a teenager had four best friends who each by coincidence had a color in their last name, until all of them suddenly and angrily rejected him from the group in their twenties for no discernible reason, with Tsukuru only now in his late thirties deciding to track each one down and find out what exactly happened two decades previous, because of a new girlfriend who feels that he needs closure over this part of his life. And for most of the book, this is indeed just enough of a story to make a highly readable and intriguing tale, as Murakami shows us the twisting fates of each of the friends in middle-age, and makes a lot of insightful comments about the slippery nature of memory, the fragile nature of friendship, and the surprises in life that greet all of us as we become older and hopefully wiser people.
The problem, though, is that Murakami never does anything with all this, letting the story peter out into a little nothing whimper by the end; we never learn the answer to the plot's central mystery (or, that is, we learn superficially why the friends rejected Tsukuru, which I'll let remain a surprise, but we never learn why the thing happened that led to the rejection), and our hero never comes to any kind of resolution about it all, simply drifting off into contemplation as a way of unsatisfactorily ending the novel. And in the meanwhile, the book is full of annoying distractions as well that seem to have no purpose: Tsukuru's middle-aged girlfriend turns out to already have a lover, but we never learn why she's dating Tsukuru as well or what she plans to do about it all, plus there's an entire subplot about a male friend Tsukuru has as a twentysomething, who he may or may not have had a homoerotic experience with, which might've instead been an intensely real-seeming dream, and who suddenly disappears before anything else happens and never enters the story again. It all adds up by the end to a reading experience that was never actively horrible, but that left me at the last page scratching my head and thinking, "Why did I even bother reading this?" And the answer is because it's Haruki Murakami, and a man with Haruki Murakmi's reputation gets an automatic read from me no matter what the new book is, even as those books keep becoming more and more dissatisfying with each new title. Granted, at this point I'll probably still keep reading each new one as they come out, but I have officially given up on the idea of this once mighty author ever putting out again anything that comes even close to the amazing, powerful novels of his youth.
CCLaP's newest novel drops on April 14th! This is a highly funny and insightful tale set in contemporaFTC DISCLOSURE: I am the publisher of this book.
CCLaP's newest novel drops on April 14th! This is a highly funny and insightful tale set in contemporary China, about the tens of millions of young rural farmers who are being turned into the nation's first generation of suburban white-collar workers, and also a "Catch-22" style dark comedy about the pitfalls of being a journalist within a communist country with state-controlled media. Featuring a brilliant ending which makes me laugh every single time I read it, this instructs as much as it entertains, and you will have a whole new view of the "New China" after finishing this charming literary debut of Washington DC financial expert Scott Abrahams.
CCLaP is currently sending out review copies of this book to ANYONE at Goodreads who promises to do a write-up! Just drop me a line at [ilikejason at gmail.com] if you're interested....more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)
We Westerners are of course familiar with the historical period known as the Renaissance; taking place between the 1300s and 1600s, it's the period when Europeans finally crawled out of their Dark-Age hole, rediscovered such ancient Greek concepts as science and philosophy, and started doing such things for the first time as sailing to the far corners of the planet. But did you know that China as well went through its own brief Renaissance at the same time, actually sailing around the planet on a regular basis a full 50 years before the Europeans started doing so, and that it was the maps and tips these Chinese gave to the Europeans that allowed the great figures from the "Age of Discovery" to make their voyages in the first place? Well, okay, so not everyone completely agrees with this theory; but it's the surprisingly strong one being espoused in the books 1421: The Year China Discovered America and 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, both of them by a retired British naval commander named Gavin Menzies, a hobbyist scholar who just happened to start stumbling across more and more evidence during his studies to support the theory mentioned above. See, the whole thing is problematic, because the Chinese actually went through a major period of isolationism right after this brief period of world-traveling, specifically as a overreaction to Ghengis Khan and his Mongol Hoard Horde(!), which had actually held and ruled China all the way up to the beginning of the 1400s, or in other words the beginning of the Ming Dynasty in that country.
According to well-known history, the Chinese were so set on turning inwards at this point, they actually destroyed most of their own records regarding their globetrotting sea voyages from this period, just so no one else would be tempted to make such trips again; according to Menzies, he has slowly been putting the pieces back together through shreds of evidence in other countries, stone markers and rescued scrolls and the like, revealing that the Ming Dynasty's own period of global seafaring was actually much larger than any of us have ever realized, a systematic series of successes that would've virtually guaranteed China's eventual world domination, if they had simply stuck with it instead of embarking on a four-hundred-year period of profound isolationism like they actually did. It's certainly an intriguing theory, and Menzies does a pretty credible job backing it up; these are giant thick books we're talking about (over a thousand pages altogether), just chock-full of evidence both direct and circumstantial. Combine this, then, with Menzies' tech-savvy prose concerning the problems of map-drawing and chart-creating in that period, which is why certain documents from that period need to be widened or narrowed in Photoshop before they'll actually line up with real coastlines; it's just one of the dozens of little issues and problems with all this old evidence, he argues, that prevented it from being all added together by anyone else before now. (See, one of the things Menzies did while in the navy was actually sail the ancient Chinese routes talked about in these books; he therefore has an expert's understanding on what these routes must've been like for the original Chinese sailors, and can thus explain the inconsistencies in the maps and charts they left behind.)
These were great reads, books that really crank the gears of the mind into action (why, just the descriptions of a glittering, wealthy Southeast Asia in the 1400s is worth the cover price alone); I'll warn you, though, that these are denser books than the usual airport and beach reads, not exactly academic in complexity but definitely stories you need to pay careful attention to while reading. That said, they both get a big recommendation from me, especially for the growing amount of people in the western half of the world who are becoming more and more curious these days about the mysterious history of the eastern half.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)
We Westerners are of course familiar with the historical period known as the Renaissance; taking place between the 1300s and 1600s, it's the period when Europeans finally crawled out of their Dark-Age hole, rediscovered such ancient Greek concepts as science and philosophy, and started doing such things for the first time as sailing to the far corners of the planet. But did you know that China as well went through its own brief Renaissance at the same time, actually sailing around the planet on a regular basis a full 50 years before the Europeans started doing so, and that it was the maps and tips these Chinese gave to the Europeans that allowed the great figures from the "Age of Discovery" to make their voyages in the first place? Well, okay, so not everyone completely agrees with this theory; but it's the surprisingly strong one being espoused in the books 1421: The Year China Discovered America and 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, both of them by a retired British naval commander named Gavin Menzies, a hobbyist scholar who just happened to start stumbling across more and more evidence during his studies to support the theory mentioned above. See, the whole thing is problematic, because the Chinese actually went through a major period of isolationism right after this brief period of world-traveling, specifically as a overreaction to Ghengis Khan and his Mongol Hoard, which had actually held and ruled China all the way up to the beginning of the 1400s, or in other words the beginning of the Ming Dynasty in that country.
According to well-known history, the Chinese were so set on turning inwards at this point, they actually destroyed most of their own records regarding their globetrotting sea voyages from this period, just so no one else would be tempted to make such trips again; according to Menzies, he has slowly been putting the pieces back together through shreds of evidence in other countries, stone markers and rescued scrolls and the like, revealing that the Ming Dynasty's own period of global seafaring was actually much larger than any of us have ever realized, a systematic series of successes that would've virtually guaranteed China's eventual world domination, if they had simply stuck with it instead of embarking on a four-hundred-year period of profound isolationism like they actually did. It's certainly an intriguing theory, and Menzies does a pretty credible job backing it up; these are giant thick books we're talking about (over a thousand pages altogether), just chock-full of evidence both direct and circumstantial. Combine this, then, with Menzies' tech-savvy prose concerning the problems of map-drawing and chart-creating in that period, which is why certain documents from that period need to be widened or narrowed in Photoshop before they'll actually line up with real coastlines; it's just one of the dozens of little issues and problems with all this old evidence, he argues, that prevented it from being all added together by anyone else before now. (See, one of the things Menzies did while in the navy was actually sail the ancient Chinese routes talked about in these books; he therefore has an expert's understanding on what these routes must've been like for the original Chinese sailors, and can thus explain the inconsistencies in the maps and charts they left behind.)
These were great reads, books that really crank the gears of the mind into action (why, just the descriptions of a glittering, wealthy Southeast Asia in the 1400s is worth the cover price alone); I'll warn you, though, that these are denser books than the usual airport and beach reads, not exactly academic in complexity but definitely stories you need to pay careful attention to while reading. That said, they both get a big recommendation from me, especially for the growing amount of people in the western half of the world who are becoming more and more curious these days about the mysterious history of the eastern half.
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