Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The River at the Center of the World : A Journey Up the Yangtze and Back in Chinese Time by Simon Winchester ISBN: 0-8050-5508-8 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: 15 October, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.07 (29 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Cruising the Yangtze
Comment: This is an excellent book for anyone planning a cruise on the Yangtze. It reads like a novel. I loved it because it describes the cities and the river, but also the history and the people. Winchester must be incredibly brave (or stupid) because he traveled the Yangtze from China into Tibet with one female guide. He also has a very good chapter on the Three Gorges Dam and why it should not be built. This book is a good read for anyone interested in history, travel, adventure or China.
Rating: 4
Summary: Read backwards, as in China
Comment: As a compliant reader, this book opens in Shanghai where their travels start. I found this boring and a rehash of other travel books and the usual lurid history. After reading less than half of this chapter, I flipped to the last chapter about the Yangtze headwaters in the primitive Himalaya-like mountain ranges. The story is more exciting and less covered compared to most travelogs, although both Theroux and Jenkins have written similar stories. With Winchester, however, I learned much more about the geography and history as I continued reading backwards. There is enough repetition throughout the chapters that each can stand on its own.
Each chapter has a detailed submap so that the reader can follow along and not get lost. The front and back covers have a highlighted map of China so that one does loose sight of the big picture. The text and map includes a discussion of the Yellow River too, and for perspective comparisons to features in the US and UK. However, there are no tour pictures, other than his full-page mugshot on the back dustjacket, even though he brought a Leica [p32].
Winchester's book includes more than a typical travelog, he intersperses vignettes that include geography [his undergrad work is geology] and temporal history. These vignettes delve into their subject at more than cursory level in tour guides, so that the reader has a deeper understanding into the whys and wherefores. Such vignettes include Chairman Mao's swimming the river, the Three Gorges dam project, minority peoples, tea, Wuhan bridges, Precambrian Yangtze man, Chinese holocaust museum, Lu Shan, etc. Unfortunately, the vignettes are not listed as subtopics in the TOC so that it is hard to relocate them. I'd highly recommend that the author take a look at computer books for useful TOCs. There is a 9-page index and 5-page annotated suggested readings list. Quite a few pages have footnotes that help the reader recall/learn lesser-known facts, but I would have really wanted a numerical list of endnotes so that the reader could further research topics of interest. Many indented quotes and poem translations are unfootnoted. There is a pasted-in correction of the text [p260].
The author, an emancipated Brit, tries to write in an American frame of reference, but many Brit colloquialisms show through; such as lift [elevator p163], ship-breaking [-wrecking p43], railway wagons [cars p198], Perspex [Plexiglas p59], notice board [sign p140], etc.
His writing style is typical of a reporter, who exaggerates describing scenes with overly powerful and emotion-charged phrases. The reader needs to filter these excesses, as in:
"In places like these the water is not so much water as a horrifying white foam--a cauldron of tortured spray and air and broken rock that is filled with the wreckage of battered whirlpools and distorted rapids and with huge voids of green and black, the whole maelstrom roaring, shrieking, bellowing with a cannonade of unstoppable anger and terror [p 333]."
Water is a person and has anger and is afraid? Need I say more about his allegorical attempts?
Other writing issues include his freelance writer upbringings, measured by # of words, such as:
"They take this runoff from the high Himalayas and the other ranges and then, capturing river after river after river along the way--all of which do just the same, scouring their source mountains for every drop of water they can find--they cascade the entire collected rainfall from tens of thousands of square and high-altitude miles down the earth-stained waters of the East China Sea [p144-5]."
I kid you not but here is a 70-word sentence, part of a two-sentence paragraph. He'd flunk English 1B in any university class. Clearly this book had no editors as this is his typical writing style.
And this book is full of excessively erudite phrases, such as:
"Trading companies are crammed into dusty art deco palaces and crumbling godowns; there are real estate brokers and paging firms and couriers where once there were more classically Chinese functionaries, 'likin' officials, octroi collectors and compradors [p208]."
Hint, there is no glossary.
Curiously, from the world's outcry on the demographic moves, and cultural and environmental damage alleged due to the 3 Gorges dam, the geocentric author does not show a dotted outline that the resulting 360 mile long reservoir would cover although the author claims to have detailed DoD secret topographic maps [p xii].
Overall, however, this book is a compelling read. One just hope it is all true [p xiv]?? Since the 2008 Peking Olympics is in the works perhaps a 2nd edition is forthcoming? [page# refer to hard cover edition]
Rating: 4
Summary: Simon Winchester has done the Yangtze proud
Comment: Simon Winchester is one hot literary property these days. In the past several years he has produced such splendid nonfiction books as THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN, THE MAP THAT CHANGED THE WORLD and, most recently, KRAKATOA. Now the Picador branch of Henry Holt has issued a paperback reprint of Winchester's riveting 1996 paean to the majesty, history and folklore of the Yangtze River, THE RIVER AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD. It is still a superb read.
Winchester determined to travel the length of the 3,964-mile river (third longest in the world) from Shanghai, where it empties into the Yellow Sea, back to its source in the remote and forbidding mountain fastnesses of Tibet. Being a curious and observant fellow, Winchester stopped at cities large and small along the way to sample atmosphere, probe local history and meet interesting people. He darted off-course now and then, sometimes of necessity, at other times simply because there was something nearby that piqued his interest.
As traveling companion he enlisted a resourceful and intelligent Chinese woman whom he disguises (for fear of official retribution against her) under the name of Lily. She plays a hardheaded and outspoken Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, and brings a revealing personal dimension of her own to Winchester's story.
In addition to being a fine writer, Winchester is a born reporter. Nothing seems to escape his notice. He has done his historical and literary homework thoroughly and is not shy about intruding his own strongly held opinions into his narrative. Most of those opinions oscillate between nostalgia for the rich pageant of China's past as reflected along the river and utter disdain verging on disgust for what has become of the country under its Communist rulers.
As in most good travel writing --- indeed, like the Yangtze itself --- the "tributary" digressions in this book are fully as interesting as its main course. We learn the exact process for making Chinese brown rice vinegar and the history of tea as a major Chinese product. We learn the stories of intrepid but largely unknown westerners with names like Cornell Plant and Joseph Rock, who were early explorers of the river. We are fed many fanciful legends from Chinese mythology and a number of facts --- often depressing but always interesting --- from Chinese history.
The famous Three Gorges dam project is examined in detail and the area itself described fully. Winchester considers the whole monster project a defilement of one of China's most beautiful areas, a venture meant more to glorify the government that planned it than to help the people who will be affected by it. Many of those people, he feels, will simply be made miserable.
Chinese national pride, in fact, is a major theme that runs through the book. From the dawn of its history, China has regarded foreigners with suspicion and mistrust. They are "foreign devils" and "barbarians," and as a matter of pride they have to pay more for just about everything than do the native Chinese.
Winchester sent me scurrying to my unabridged dictionary a score or more of times to look up unfamiliar terms that seem routine to him. A few of them --- nunataks, portolanos, ayurvedic --- were nowhere to be found, but I did learn something about haars, skerry, compradors, corvees and kentledge, among others. My only tiny complaint about this reprint is that the maps, so sorely needed as the upriver journey continues, are inadequate.
The only addition to the book's 1996 text is a four-page afterword in which Winchester speculates about the future of the great Chinese cities. Beijing will continue to be the country's capital, its Washington D.C., he says. Shanghai, sitting grandly at the mouth of the Yangtze, will be its New York City --- and poor Hong Kong down in the south of the country, will be merely its New Orleans.
Unless there is some sort of unimaginable government upheaval in China, this fine book is likely to remain a classic account for many years to come. For a "foreign devil," Simon Winchester has done the Yangtze proud.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn
 |
Title: The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester ISBN: 0198607024 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
 |
Title: The Map That Changed the World : William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology by Simon Winchester ISBN: 0060931809 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
 |
Title: Krakatoa : The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester ISBN: 0066212855 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
 |
Title: River Town : Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler ISBN: 0060953748 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 24 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
 |
Title: The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester ISBN: 006099486X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: August, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
