The Mountain Whisperer is an excellent foray into traditional and quality Chinese literature. The folk tales and narratives are based on the lives of real people who lived prior to, during, and after Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The afterword explains the book. For readers who are…
Klingborg’s Thief of Souls is an impressive detective novel set in modern day China. Besides the setting in a small provincial town the size of a hamlet where ordinarily the most serious crime is the theft of chickens, in Thief of Souls Klingborg develops the…
Touch the Top of the World recollects Erik Weihenmayer‘s journey of overcoming blindness by climbing among others, Rainier, McKinley, Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua, and the mountain of all-Everest as well as learning to rock climb (El Capitan) and ice climb. Weihenmayer’s account is also the story of…
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War by Robert M. Gates is not what I expected. It is not the sensationalist tell-all story of a defense secretary battling two opposing presidential administrations. It is a compelling narrative of issues including: managing the a constant yet…
I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. Jan-Phillip Sendker did not disappoint me. Whispering Shadows is a thriller – murder mystery. A thirty-year old, a Cathay Heavy Metals executive, Michael Owen winds up dead in Shenzhen, China, located across the…
As part of my Summer Seasonal Challenge on Goodreads, I have been reading some books that have been on my bookshelf for quite a while. All of them have something in common–victims, villains, and some unusual settings. Ice Blue by Anne Stuart delves into…
Bones of the Master is a biographical-autobiographical account of Crane’s travels with a monk who journeys back to Mongolia in the late 20th century. The monk’s exodus from China, nearly four decades earlier, during the 1960 Mao-ordered destruction of all things religious is but a mere fraction…
I found this book during a Friends of the Library Sale. Until now, I had never heard of Myra Roper, a British born Australian educator, and and an expert in China. More information can be found here. China-The Surprising Country is a memoir of her…
A while back, I posted a review of When America First Met China, a history of Chinese-American-British trade relations up to where steamships enter the picture. In the book, the author, Eric Jay Dolin talks about the various continents that traders visited in search of…