This week's "New Book of the Week" is meeting readers again. In this column, we will not only list good books to write a recommendation, but we will also give our own opinions on books that readers are concerned about or have just published, as far as possible within the scope of our own reading efficiency. If the content of a new book is very exciting, we will spare no effort to recommend it, and if the content of a book does not match its attention, we will also express our opinions unreservedly in the reference opinion. In order to more intuitively see our attitude towards a book, we will also add a "recommendation index", similar to the Douban score.
Of course, the judgment of any reading is personal, and our opinions may not be correct, and may even be biased, but they must be sincere. We're just providing a reference and hope to provide readers with a guide to reading (after all, this may also risk offending the publisher). If you have a new book that you are more hesitant about and want to know our attitude, please leave a comment in the comment area, and we will give our opinions as soon as possible.
This issue is presided over | the editorial department of Beijing News Book Review Weekly
literature
"Reading Poetry on the Weekend: Drizzle and Wet Streamers"
Author: Three books
Edition: Qinghai People's Publishing House
January 2022
Referral Index: ★★★★★
Recommender: Zhang Jin
Although the three-book "Weekend Reading Poetry: Drizzle and Wet Streamer" can be roughly summarized as an "appreciation" of classical Chinese poetry, it is more accurate to say that this book is a long journey for her to fully open herself to ancient Chinese poetry, activating ancient poetry with her own life feelings, and at the same time being activated by ancient poetry. The journey continues, with the column "Weekend Poetry Reading" updated every Saturday in the Beijing News Book Review Weekly (for more details, see #周末读诗), which is a collection of forty selected articles from the first fifty issues, and aesthetic pleasure and thinking continue.
When we face ancient poetry like a concrete and vivid person, what kind of posture should we adopt? What kind of gaze do you cast? The answer is not unique, but there is a difference between good and bad. Giving simple explanations and even summarizing the "central idea" is the standard idea that was framed in our student days, but this is undoubtedly the suppression and imprisonment of the poetry itself. When we leave the classroom and look back at an ancient poem again, such as the Book of Returning To The Doll, it is the flutter of our hearts that tells us what this poem is and what it is not. The first thing to do in these reading notes of the three books is to find the poetry, based on the aesthetic imagination and by no means only words and interpretations. Perusal is the basis of aesthetics, and through perusal (and the time it takes to read carefully), a reader can grasp the fluttering words, and slowly enter the scene created by a poem under their leadership, as if crossing in place, you find yourself standing on the poet's feet in time and space, looking at those "images" with the poet's eyes, only to feel that those images were originally so vivid and so closely adhered to the poet's life. They are not flowery, poetic and simple symbols, but carry again and again joy and sighs, time and again soul touch, again and again strong perception of self-existence and confusion. Sanshu is good at "entering" poetry, and when she brings back what she sees from the "depths", we will be surprised by our own carelessness while rejoicing, and it turns out that we have only seen a poem from a distance, just like glancing at the other bank of the river, and then turning our heads and walking away in a hurry. The real scenery on the other side is just a strange forest for us to pass by, and it will not leave many traces in the memory.
It is probably appropriate to think of these articles as a search or recovery effort. What the three books want to retrieve is not just the poetry that has been ignored and suppressed, but more. After reading one by one, you can feel a certain sense of loss pervading the text, the loss of the way people live in the past time and space. The pastoral picture depicted in Wang Wei's "Weichuan Tianjia" attracts Wang Wei, and even more attracts "modern" readers. The countryside is not a relaxed and comfortable leisure, and the enviable place is not here, but the sunset-like calm and warmth revealed in this picture, the "joy of life". There are also relationships between people (think of those sincere farewell poems and moving thought poems), the natural connection between man and nature, etc... These relationships are intrinsic to their lives, but they are gradually outside of our lives. For those of us who have lost our homeland in the process of modernization and are constantly "dividing ourselves", these are the ancient past, and they are like the utopian imagination of the distant places ahead. Therefore, the search for these things is not only an aesthetic, but a necessity for survival. That is to say, the reading of the poems in the three books unfolds at the level of "the necessity of survival" and points to the survival of the present. When we "see what we have lost in Tang poems," our withered minds know what supplies and stitches are most needed, so that we can try our best (albeit only to try) to break out of the crisis of modernity and find a self that is not alienated, not materialized, not alienated, not alienated, in short, not mutilated. (Click on the envelope or this link to purchase this book)
social science
Sacrifice and Becoming a God: The Order of the First People's Society
Author: [French] René Kirlar
Translator: Zhou Mang
Edition: Life, Reading, and New Knowledge Triptych Bookstore
March 2022
Referral Index: ★★★★★
Recommended by: Luo Dong
Fifty years after the first French edition, René Girard's Sacrifice and Becoming of Gods: The Order of the First People's Society finally has a Chinese edition. He examined the ancient and universal human phenomenon of sacrifice.
Sacrifice takes place in "society," that is, group life after people begin to cooperate and form rules. Man is not the only animal with a group life, animals such as bees, ants and wolves all have this characteristic, or in other words, the "sociality" or "socialization" that people often talk about are not actually the greatest characteristics of human beings. However, some mechanisms are unique to people. Sacrifice is one of them. For example, what we learn through novels, history books, or film and television dramas is that in early Chinese society such as the Zhou Dynasty, the terrifying human sacrifice was one of the most important systems at that time, and it was not until the Spring and Autumn Warring States that there was a gradual trend of relaxation. In the process, the sacrifices were turned from humans to animals. And this is also the general logic of early societies around the world. God was angry, disasters came, and mankind sacrificed, first for man and then for animal. But for a long time, we thought that the substitution of animals such as cattle, sheep and chickens for human sacrifices had fundamentally changed this form.
Kilar argues that the sacrificers were always looking for the sacrificed person who had something in common with themselves, the "scapegoat," even animals. And as history progresses, we forget the commonality and thus do not remember the original, most basic meaning of sacrifice. This requires some kind of intellectual archaeology to re-understand this. As I said earlier, not only people live in society (the typical exception is that ants have their "ant society"), but people are animals with desire will and ability to act, and entering group life produces conflicts, so that the community encounters a crisis of disintegration is almost inevitable fate. Sacrifice became a way to preserve and save the order of the community. This is because it allows the passion of violence to be vented, and the sacrificial those who are sacrificed and their entire sacrificial rituals are consequently sanctified and become the institutional culture accepted by the members of the community. As the original French title "La violence et le sacré" implies, "violence" and "sacredness.". In fact, in the modern nation-state, people also sacrifice the sacrifices of a certain group of people, suicides, etc., or use it to relieve the violence of internal dissatisfaction, or use it as a symbol of social change, and eventually become sacred.
Knowledge
Field Manual of Chinese Birds (new edition by Ma Jingneng)
Author: John Ma Jingneng
Translator: Li Yifan
Edition: The Commercial Press
January 2022
Referral Index: ★★★★★
Recommended by: Anya
Ma Jingneng, professor emeritus of the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology at the University of Kent, has worked in China for more than 30 years and has authored numerous papers, reports and books related to biodiversity in China. A Field Guide to the Birds of China, published by Oxford University Press and edited by Ma Jingneng, is more than 20 years old. As a complete field manual based on contemporary taxonomic systems and with full color maps, the book has played an important role in promoting bird watching activities and bird surveys in China in the past 20 years, and has become one of the bird identification reference books often used by bird watching enthusiasts, researchers, photography enthusiasts and so on.
Compared with the previous version, the new edition adds more easy-to-use details, including 1484 species of birds (the old version is 1329 species), each with the latest distribution map, and a QR code with a song link, which helps to improve the accuracy of bird identification. In addition, the book adds maps of 21 species distributed domestically and possibly recorded bird species. Compared with more than 20 years ago, the current bird taxonomy has undergone great changes, some new species and known species have been newly discovered in China, and the distribution area of some birds has changed significantly compared with the past.
history
Life and Death in the Third Reich
Author: [U.S.] Peter Fritzer
Translator: Hu Xilin
Version: Oracle | Social Sciences Literature Press
December 2021
Referral Index: ★★★★★
Recommended by: Li Yang
"The Evil of Mediocrity". This concept invented by Hannah Arendt is so overused that it can be sprinkled like pepper noodles on any one collective evil event. On the face of it, the actions of ordinary people under Nazi Germany do indeed fit the world's imagination of the concept of "banal evil." In the name of responding to calls and obeying orders, they reported Jews, denounced their neighbors, participated in the persecution frenzy of ethnic cleansing, and became indispensable screws in the proper functioning of the Nazi evil power machine — a statement that does not find too many flaws, but it does not solve the fundamental question: How exactly did people participate (join, or transform) into the collective evils of the Nazis?
Peter Fritzer's Life and Death in the Third Reich gives an answer to this question in a way, albeit somewhat painfully, because it largely undermines the illusion that most people are simply Nazis, even victims of lies and wars. But if one really wants to answer how the Nazi regime was formed and functioned, it is necessary to re-examine the relationship between the collective terms "German populace" and "Nazis", and to ask the question: How far did the Germans go as Nazis in 1933-1945?
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