Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Penguin). First of all, we have to recommend the 2007 Kiriyama Prize winner for nonfiction. This book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 42 weeks and counting, and it richly deserves its wide readership. Former mountain climber Greg Mortenson's story, about how he came to build schools for children in remote Pakistan and Afghanistan, is heartwarming, inspiring, and thought provoking, in other words, the perfect holiday gift.
Art and Photography
The Great Wall of China: Photographs by Chen Changfen, text by Anne Wilkes Tucker (Yale University Press). Chen Changfen has been photographing the Great Wall since 1964. This fascinating book presents a small fraction of his decades-long study of the monumental wall and conveys the fertile range of themes and ideas that Chen has investigated. Chen's richly evocative photographs both celebrate the remarkable series of building campaigns that produced the Wall and memorialize the thousands of conscripted laborers whose lives were sacrificed to its construction. With a forward by noted China scholar Jonathan Spence.
The Yellow River: The Spirit and Strength of China by Aldo Pavan (Thames & Hudson). The Chinese people consider the Yellow River to be the cradle of their civilization, the Mother River. During China's long and rich history, the Yellow River has been considered a blessing as well as a curse and has been nicknamed both "China's Pride" and "China's Sorrow." Aldo Pavan's stunning photographs combine with text that gives insight into everyday life and describe the great variety of cultures, religions, ethnic groups, and landscapes along the mighty waterway. Pavan's previous book, Along the Sacred Waters, about the Ganges in India, would also make an excellent gift.
The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss by Claire Nouvian (University Of Chicago Press). Combining the latest scientific discoveries with astonishing color imagery, The Deep takes readers on a voyage into the darkest realms of the ocean. Revealing nature's oddest and most mesmerizing creatures in crystalline detail, The Deep features more than 200 color photographs of terrifying sea monsters, living fossils, and ethereal bioluminescent creatures, some photographed here for the very first time. Accompanying these breathtaking photographs are contributions from some of the world's most respected researchers that examine the biology of deep-sea organisms, the ecology of deep-sea habitats, and the history of deep-sea exploration.
Inside North Korea by Mark Edward Harris (Chronicle Books). All but closed to outside visitors and influence, its public posture guarded, the outside world sees almost nothing from inside North Korea. Award-winning photographer Mark Edward Harris has had rare access to the country, traveling within its borders as well as documenting life along its northern border with China and the highly militarized DMZ dividing North and South Korea. His images are amazing: the monumental architecture and empty streets of the capital; tightly controlled zones of economic and tourist trade with South Korea; mass games featuring 100,000 choreographed participants. Short essays, extended captions, and a foreword by former Kiriyama Prize finalist author Bruce Cumings further illuminate a country increasingly at the center of international politics.
Through The Eyes Of The Condor: An Aerial Vision of Latin America by Robert B. Haas (National Geographic). Step aboard a private plane for a breathtaking tour of the immense and varied wilderness of Latin America—lush lands and scenic waterways nearly impossible to experience any other way. Your guide to this remarkable vision is Robert B. Haas, award-winning environmentalist and one of the world's foremost artists in aerial photography. Poignant essays penned by Haas while living in Latin America expand on themes important to understanding the region: culture, economy, development, tourism, and more. With an introduction by Marie Arana, whose 2007 novel Cellophane was recognized as a Kiriyama Prize notable book.
Impressions of the East: Treasures from the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley by Deborah Rudolph, editor (Heyday Books). Color woodblock prints, early maps of Asia and beyond, and gorgeously detailed scrolls are just some of the highlights in the collection of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley. From oracle bones to twentieth-century manuscripts, Impressions of the East presents selections from the Library's rare book collection in their technological and cultural contexts. Embedded in the descriptions of the works featured is a lucidly sketched history of the lands where the works originated and the ways in which they influenced each other. Opulently produced and brilliantly designed, the book brings excitement and scholarly insight to the print and manuscript traditions of East Asia.
Distant Rain by Tess Gallagher and Jakucho Setouchi, illustrated by Keiko Hara, translated by Hiromi Hashimoto (Eastern Washington University Press). Distant Rain records a conversation between the eloquent American poet Tess Gallagher and the renowned Japanese novelist and Buddhist nun Jakuchō Setouchi that took place in 1990 at Jakuan, Jakuchō Setouchi's home temple, in Sagano, Japan. It is a frank and, at times, humorous exchange, during which Gallagher talks about the death of her husband, Raymond Carver, and Setouchi speaks of the loss of her lover. The two women trade observations about love and loss and about the role of writing in coping with grief. Their words, reproduced in both English and Japanese, unfold accordion-style across the striking woodblock and stencil prints of artist Keiko Hara, in an intricate masterpiece of book design. The book is complemented by the exquisite lettering of typographer Maki Yamashita and the influence of master bookbinder Atsuo Ikuta. Distant Rain is not only a moving tribute to love, but a stunning example of the art of book design.
A Taste of Asia
The Seventh Daughter: My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco by Cecilia Chiang and Lisa Weiss with a forward by Alice Waters and photographs by Leigh Beisch (Ten Speed Press). A pioneer in the food world, Cecilia Chiang introduced Americans to authentic northern Chinese cuisine at her San Francisco restaurant, the Mandarin, in 1961, earning the adoration of generations of diners, including local luminaries such as Marion Cunningham, Ruth Reichl, and Chuck Williams. In The Seventh Daughter, Chiang presents a classic collection of recipes framed by her gripping life's story. Beginning with her account of a privileged childhood in 1920s and 1930s Beijing, Chiang chronicles a 1,000-mile trek on foot in the wake of the Japanese occupation, her arrival in San Francisco, and her transformation from accidental restaurateur to culinary pioneer. The book's recipes feature cherished childhood dishes and definitive Mandarin classics, while showcasing Cecilia's purist approach to authentic Chinese home cooking.
My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional Modern Parsi Home Cooking by Niloufer Ichaporia King with a forward by Alice Waters (University of California Press) The Persians of antiquity were renowned for their lavish cuisine and their never-ceasing fascination with the exotic. These traits still find expression in the cooking of India's rapidly dwindling Parsi population—descendants of Zoroastrians who fled Persia after the Sassanian empire fell to the invading Arabs. The first book published in the United States on Parsi food written by a Parsi, this beautiful volume includes 165 recipes and makes one of India's most remarkable regional cuisines accessible to Westerners. In an intimate narrative rich with personal experience, the author leads readers into a world of new ideas, tastes, ingredients, and techniques, with a range of easy and seductive menus that will reassure neophytes and challenge explorers.
The Sweet Spot: Asian-Inspired Desserts by Pichet Ong and Genevieve Ko, forward by Jean-George Vongerichten (William Morrow). Asia is home to a dazzling array of sweets rich with tropical fruits, crunchy nuts, aromatic spices—even chocolate. In The Sweet Spot, renowned pastry chef Pichet Ong presents a collection of 100 recipes for cakes, cookies, pies, tarts, puddings, ice creams, candies, and more. Eschewing the heavy use of butter and sugar, Ong instead highlights the vibrant flavors of Asia—jasmine, lychee, orange blossom water, passion fruit, yuzu, mangosteen, and sesame, to name just a few. And despite the complexity of flavors and textures, all of the recipes are easy enough to make in home kitchens, requiring minimal effort for maximum results. The Sweet Spot includes lush color photographs of almost all of the finished dishes.
Asian Flavors of Jean Georges by Georges Vongerichten (Broadway Books) Jean-Georges Vongerichten, chef and owner of 18 restaurants around the world, is a pioneer of Asian-fusion. In Asian Flavors of Jean-Georges, he presents dozens of recipes for reproducing the dishes that have made his restaurants—Vong, Spice Market, and 66—the hottest dining destinations in New York City. Now Jean-Georges has brought together the best of his pan-Asian recipes in one exciting cookbook. The recipes reflect his extraordinary talent for creating intensely flavorful dishes inspired by simple home cooking and street food. Each recipe is laid out in a clear, easy-to-follow style, and throughout the book invaluable tips are offered for streamlining preparation and cooking.
Engaging Histories
Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu by Laurence Bergreen (Knopf). This is a comprehensive biography of one of the world's earliest and most influential explorers and one of history's most fascinating characters. Based on extensive research that took him from Venice to China to Mongolia (where he lived in a ger camp, as Mongols did in Polo's time), Bergreen gives us a lush story of adventure, exploration, and commerce. Former Kiriyama Prize finalist Simon Winchester remarked on Bergreen's book, "At last! Marco Polo comes to life! Laurence Bergreen, perhaps America's liveliest biographer, has created a triumph of fascinations, a classic portrait that now surely can never be bettered."
The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 by William Dalrymple (Knopf). Winning historian and travel writer Dalrymple shapes his powerful retelling of this fateful course of events from groundbreaking material: previously unexamined Urdu and Persian manuscripts that include Indian eyewitness accounts and records of the Delhi courts, police and administration during the siege. The Last Mughal is a revelatory work—the first to present the Indian perspective on the fall of Delhi—and has as its heart both the dazzling capital personified by Zafar and the stories of the individuals tragically caught up in one of the bloodiest upheavals in history. The New York Review of Books called this a compulsively readable masterpiece.
Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan (Random House USA and Penguin Books Canada). University of Toronto historian MacMillan recounts, in fascinating detail, Richard Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972. The author weaves together biographies of all the principals, contemporary geopolitics, a perceptive understanding of Chinese sensibilities, and a fine array of anecdotes (a Kissinger aide who had experienced the effects of Moutai cabled frantically, "Under no circumstances should the President actually drink from his glass in response to banquet toasts."). This book was published on 2006 in Canada under the title, Nixon in China.
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam (Hyperion). More than three decades after the publication of Halberstam's semininal book on the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest, the author used his unrivalled research and formidable journalistic skills to shed light on another dark corner in U.S. history: the Korean War. Halberstam, who died in a tragic car accident earlier this year, considered The Coldest Winter the best book he ever wrote, the culmination of 45 years of writing about America's postwar foreign policy. Halberstam gives us a masterful narrative of the political decisions and miscalculations on both sides. He charts the disastrous path that led to the massive entry of Chinese forces near the Yalu, and that caught Douglas MacArthur and his soldiers by surprise. He provides astonishingly vivid and nuanced portraits of all the major figures on both sides of the conflict. At the same time, Halberstam provides us with his trademark highly evocative narrative journalism, chronicling the crucial battles with reportage of the highest order.
Fiction
The Complete Stories by David Malouf (Pantheon). The narrative voices in David Malouf's brilliant Complete Stories share a haunting specificity. They are often the voices of children, powerful in their bluntness and perceptiveness, but also puzzled—about their identities, their relationships to others, what they seem to have lost or missed out on. Malouf is the prize-winning author of 10 novels and six volumes of poetry, and his language is gorgeous—incantatory, Faulknerian, often biblical. It startles and seduces, a scrim of dream which overlays a structure as carefully rendered as a poem or a piece of music.
Peony in Love by Lisa See (Random House). In her fifth novel, a fictionalized account based on historical facts in the form of a ghost story, Lisa See brings alive the social and cultural milieu of women of the wealthy literati class in late seventeenth-century Qing China through the captivating first-person narrative of her lovestruck, long-suffering, and ultimately quite remarkable protagonist, Peony Chen. See uses the famous Chinese opera love story to mirror and foreshadow the fate of a spirited young woman who dares to choose her own destiny.
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (Dial). In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives. On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations. As Mr. Watts says, "A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe." Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.
The Elephanta Suite by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin). A master of the travel narrative weaves three intertwined novellas of Westerners transformed by their sojourns in India. This startling, far-reaching book captures the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today's India. Theroux's Westerners risk venturing far beyond the subcontinent's well-worn paths to discover woe or truth or peace. A middle-aged couple on vacation veers heedlessly from idyll to chaos. A buttoned-up Boston lawyer finds succor in Mumbai's reeking slums. And a young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore. We also meet Indian characters as singular as they are reflective of the country's subtle ironies: an executive who yearns to become a holy beggar, an earnest young striver whose personality is rewired by acquiring an American accent, a miracle-working guru, and others.
Heaven's Net is Wide (Tales of the Otori series) by Lian Hearn (Penguin Group USA). This is a prequel to Across the Nightingale Floor, the book that first introduced Hearn's mythical, medieval Japanese world. It is the story of Lord Otori Shigeru, who has presided over the entire series as a sort of spiritual warrior-godfather-the man and who saved Takeo and raised him as his own and heir to the Otori clan. This sweeping novel expands on what has been only hinted at before: Shigeru's training in the ways of the warrior and feudal lord, his relationship with the Tribe of mysteriously powerful assassins, the battles that tested his skills and talents, and his fateful meeting with Lady Maruyama. This book leaves off where Across the Nightingale Floor begins, finally bringing the Otori series full circle.
Cries in the Drizzle by Yu Hua (Anchor). This beautiful, heartbreaking novel follows a young Chinese boy throughout his childhood and adolescence during the reign of Chairman Mao. The middle son of three, Sun Guanglin is constantly neglected ignored by his parents and his younger and older brother. Sent away at age six to live with another family, he returns to his parents' house six years later on the same night that their home burns to the ground, making him even more a black sheep. Yet Sun Guanglin's status as an outcast, both at home and in his village, places him in a unique position to observe the changing nature of Chinese society, as social dynamics—and his very own family—are changed forever under Communist rule. With its moving, thoughtful prose, Cries in the Drizzle is a stunning addition to the wide-ranging work of one of China's most distinguished contemporary writers.
The Inspector O series by James Church (St. Martin's Press/Minotaur). A former judge for the Kiriyama Prize recently remarked, "I just love the Inspector O mysteries set in North Korea. The Corpse in the Koryo is one of the best books I've read in the last year. The second in the series, just published, is Hidden Moon. The author, James Church, is a former intelligence officer writing under a pseudonym. The books provide a detailed inside look at North Korean society, and they are both fine mysteries."
Colin Cotterill's mystery series (Soho Press, USA; Random House Canada; Text Publishing, Australia). All set in Laos and featuring coroner and mystery-solver Dr. Siri Paiboun, these novels have received rave reviews for their engaging blend of humor and intrigue. Buy the whole set, or start with The Coroner's Lunch, then move on to Thirty-Three Teeth, Disco for the Departed, and the newest book in the series, Anarchy and Old Dogs. Multi-talented Cotterill has also started a project called Books for Laos. Read about it on the author's website.
Posted December 2007
