Reporter | Zhao Yunxian
Edit | Yellow Moon
1 "Goodbye to the Shining Stars: Twenty Houses of Tang Poetry"
Jing Kaixuan
Nanjing University Publishing 2021-11
Jing Kaixuan, a professor at the Overseas College of Nanjing University, made a travel through the works of twenty Tang Dynasty poets and included twenty poetry essays in this book. He avoided giving the poets conclusive conclusions, but used their most important works to contemplate the self-consciousness, the concept of time, aesthetic tastes, and ways of feeling in Chinese culture. He believes that poetry presents the poet's life style, "Wang Wei longs to return, Li Bai looks forward to the distance, and Du Fu always walks on the road"; in terms of time, he contrasts Li Shangyin's "the sunset is infinitely good, but only near dusk" with Goethe's "The west sinks forever is this same sun", pointing out the instantaneous and eternal differences in the perception of time between Chinese and Western cultures; as far as self-consciousness is concerned, he advocates that Chinese scholars are not absent, but not seen in a posture of resistance, "In the end, they failed to develop the concept of personal freedom from the realization of self-desire." The idea of natural rights cannot be produced from the thinking of the heavens and the people", and can only vent the anger in the mountains and rivers.
In addition to these essays, the book also contains several articles that discuss the Tang Dynasty monk poetry, female poetry, endorsement style, and the role of the scholar.
"The Kids Behind Them"
[French] by Nikolai Matthew by Long Yun translation
Shanghai Translation Publishing House 2021-9
The decadent former industrial areas of northeastern France are increasingly attracting the attention of Chinese readers. Last year, french sociologist Didier Eripon's "Return to His Hometown" was published in China, and he used the theory to reflect on his hometown of Reims and the past experience of workers' family life. When he was young, shortly after the rise of neoliberalism, people in traditional industrial areas had begun to eat the bitter fruit: unemployment and domestic violence, school dropouts, and community decay. By the 1990s, the region's prospects were even bleaker.
The Children After Them is the second novel by French writer Nicolas Matthew, which won the French Goncourt Prize for Literature in 2018. The novel intercepts the four summers of 1992, 1994, 1996 and 1998, telling the growth story of a group of teenagers in northeastern France, most of whom are the children of workers and ethnic minorities, living in the former steel city of Erange (the prototype is the author's hometown of Lorraine), life has not improved, once illegal means to make a fortune overseas, and finally in exchange for greater drag, forever imprisoned here. The only one who walked out of Elenges was considered superior locally, but in the eyes of her Paris preparatory class classmates, she was just a countryman, "Outside of Paris, there is only a second-rate life." ”
Neoliberal influences on characters are everywhere, but the novel does not directly write about a series of economic treaties signed by France in the nineties or a national strike, and the waves of history always reach the lives of marginalized people in a gentle gesture and stir it up and down. The French newspaper Express commented: "The author has a broad perspective, often talking about yesterday, but depicting today. Even under the epidemic (or "in the midst of the epidemic"), there are still yellow vests on the streets of Paris.
"Peaceful Piggy"
[English] J.K. Rowling by [English] Jim Field, translated by Wang Mengda
Nova Press 2022-1
Rather than long, serious works, people are increasingly inclined to pay attention to what a writer says on social media, and even use those words to judge his writing level and moral conduct. Since 2018, J.K. Rowling, who advocates the objective existence of biological sex, has been repeatedly attacked as a "transphobic person", and fans of the Harry Potter series of novels and movies have cut her off and even demanded that she be removed from the wizarding world, as for Rowling's efforts to construct a pluralistic world in the book, it has either been ignored or turned into incriminating evidence because she is not radical enough.
Amid the fire of politically correct public opinion, the publication of Rowling's new work "Little Pig of Peace" appears to be silent. It was the first time she had imagined another wizarding world since Harry Potter. Jack in the story has a bad time at school, the doll Toot Toot is his only companion, but unfortunately flew out of the window and disappeared, as compensation, he received a doll piglet who looked the same as Toot Toot. One night, Ping'an, who has been abandoned aside, comes back to life, and he tells Jack that in order to retrieve Toot, he must go to the Lost and Found, and Jack embarks on an adventure with his unwanted peace. In this work, Rowling explores the relationship between people and things, memories and the present, and she expects to think through stories about what it means to lose, for her, the pain of change and loss is inevitable, "but good things can still arise from it." ”
Hypnosis and Popular Science in Modern China
By Zhang Bangyan
Guangqi Bookstore | Shanghai People's Publishing House 2021-11
The "May Fourth" movement played the slogan of "Mr. Sai" to save the country, and at that time, research on chemical physics and engineering construction became a popularity among the elite, and the history of later generations was also quite detailed. However, in addition to the elite, there is also a kind of "popular science" that is widely spread among the middle and lower classes of the people, and its influence is so wide that even the revolutionaries Tao Chengzhang, the master of traditional Chinese studies Qian Mu and others have been networked, and it is hypnosis.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic of China, Western hypnosis was introduced to China through Japan, and its uses were extensive, from transforming the Chinese people, practicing and curing diseases, down to quitting smoking addiction, performing entertainment, military teachers, traders and staff were loyal practitioners of hypnosis, and the concept of the five elements and qi in Chinese culture and the psychic body concept in folk beliefs were brought into this imported product and integrated and transformed. A graduate of the Department of Medicine at Yangming University in Taiwan, Bangyan Zhang is passionate about the history of psychological science and medical history, systematically studied the problem of hypnosis in modern China at the master's degree level, and wrote the first draft of the book. Influenced by the boom in the history of popular science in the West, Zhang Bangyan turned his attention to the middle and lower classes of society when exploring the modernity of the May Fourth "science", and he found that in addition to the scientism of intellectuals, the "science" of the masses contained more elements of consumer culture and national politics. In his view, hypnosis represents a science jointly constructed and practiced by the public and the intellectual elite, which makes knowledge and institutional reserves for the next development of Chinese society in the field of psychology and psychiatry, and also reflects the mentality of the Chinese people in the past to save the people and to create new people.
"Paradise" after the Disaster: Suzhou City Life after the Fall of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression
Wu Ren forgave
The university asked | Guangxi Normal University Press 2021-11
On November 19, 1937, Suzhou fell, and the once rich prosperity dissipated in the war and killing. For a time, the residents of Suzhou fled to the surrounding countryside and the Shanghai concession, and the historian Zhang Weiren of National Taiwan University was also fleeing to the ranks when he was a child, when there were dead bodies outside the city, and he still thinks of it with fear. However, on this ruin occupied by the enemy army, the city began to recover, and even strangely prospered, when some newspapers described Suzhou as "paradise after the disaster".
In this book, Wu Renshu examines the industry situation of the "four pavilions" (tea houses, restaurants, hotels and tobacco pipes) in Suzhou during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and uses this as a base point to reproduce the daily life of the people in the occupied areas. Different from the previous impression of the economic decline of the enemy-occupied areas, after the situation in Suzhou was slightly stabilized, the residents began to move back, and the city began to recover. After the Wang puppet regime designated Suzhou as the capital of the puppet province of Jiangsu Province, a large number of people from outside the country, merchants, Shanghai Yugong, Shaoxing people and other groups of people moved into Suzhou, and in Wu Renshu's view, they formed a new consumption layer, so although the tax collection was strict, the material control system raised prices, and the people lamented the difficulties of the times, the leisure industry represented by the "four pavilions" was a deformed and prosperous scene. The author selects historical materials based on archival documents, newspapers, local documents and oral histories, and also refers to the diaries of local intellectuals, reproducing the daily life of people of different occupations and classes in Suzhou at that time.
How to Read Kierkegaard
[Beauty] John Translated by D. Caputo by Zhou Rongsheng
Lucida | Beijing United Publishing Company 2021-12
Born into a wealthy family in Copenhagen in the 19th century, Soren Obi Kierkegaard was doomed to fail to blend in with the mundane world due to his father's tyranny and his own introspective ability, but to determine his existence with an astonishing number of works dressed in countless pseudonyms. He proposed two far-reaching concepts: one is the "truth of existence", which means that the truth that people live for and die for is the passionate model of individual survival; the other is "single individual", that is, the self is irreplaceable and unique. At the beginning of the 20th century, his work entered the German world, influencing Barthes and Heidegger, and through them influencing Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus in France, Kierkegaard is also known as the "father of existentialism".
In this book, the contemporary American philosopher John F. Kennedy D. Caputo selected ten key texts of Kierkegaard and interpreted them in conjunction with the life of the thinker. This is a volume in the "How to Read Philosophy" book series, edited by the British philosopher Simon Krichley, which introduces the ideas of Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida and others through the method of textual perusal.
"Westward Shadow Chronicles"
Ma Xiaofeng Zhuang Jun Editor-in-Chief
After the wave | Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House 2021-11
In the spring of 1934, a young man named Zhuang Xueben resigned from his job at the Nanjing International Savings Association and followed a special mission of the National Government in Nanjing to Tibet at his own expense to pay tribute to the 13th Dalai Lama. A shallow water boat departs from Shanghai and travels westward through the Wuxia Gorge into Sichuan. The people on the ship participated in a national walking group four years ago, and after returning, their curiosity about the plateau Tibetan area once again urged him to leave a stable life and discover the strange things and interesting things in the dangerous land. Due to the obstruction of the mission officials, Zhuang Xueben was unable to enter Tibet as planned, and he turned to the outer land of Oluo (present-day Guoluo Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province), all the way over the mountains, and then through Xiqiang, Xirong, Xifan and other places. During this period, he recorded the lives of the locals with photography and writing, calling himself a "wild fan" who slandered his compatriots, which was "a big fallacy". Although he was unable to enter Tibet, he was already prepared for his frontier travel and photography career for more than ten years.
In the winter of 1935, Zhuang Xueben accompanied the Ninth Panchen Lama back to Tibet by way to Lhasa via Qinghai, but the panchen Lama's death and the outbreak of war told him not to enter Tibet, but instead lingered in the border area around Tibet for ten years, leaving behind many video materials that absorb anthropological theories and methods. Zhu Jingjiang, director of the Film and Television Anthropology Research Center of the University for Nationalities of China, believes that compared with the foreign photographers who shot China's frontiers in the 1930s and 1940s, Zhuang Xueben's images are better in terms of mood and charm, and the content of the gun fighting, marriage and funeral, witchcraft and other contents filmed is extremely rare, which has important historical and ethnic documentary significance, calling it "the pioneer of Chinese image anthropology", which is well deserved.
Zhuang Xueben's journey to the west, on the one hand, is to conform to his original heart, on the other hand, he is also to respond to the call to develop the northwest and unite the nation at a time of national crisis, but the strange political situation of the twentieth century has made this pure heart and its achievements silent for many years.
The Bee Hunt: An Entomologist's Round the World
Dave Goulson by Wang Hongbin Ran Hao Translated by Three Butterflies Reviewer
Yilin Publishing House 2021-11
British entomologist Dave Goulson began collecting butterflies and moths at the age of seven or eight, and gradually became an expert in identification. He feeds moths and makes flawless specimens. When he was twelve, he was finally tired of killing these lovely creatures, and watching the butterfly caterpillar feather and fly away from his hands was the happiest thing. After becoming a father, Gulson still retained this habit, accompanying his children to the fields to catch insects with light nets, observing them and then releasing them back into nature.
The book follows Goulsen's journey around the globe in search of bumblebees, using fluent language to describe the neglected insect world in the corners, and thinking about the relationship between man and nature during the journey. He believes that today's adults have excessively distanced children from nature for fear that they will be harmed in it, but in the long course of history, most human beings have been in close contact with nature during childhood. Allowing children to take risks in nature, learn to protect themselves and face injury, is a thing that does more good than harm.