Reporter | Ye Qing
Edit | Lin Zi people
1 The Texture of Poverty: Wang's British Observations
Wang Wu sighed
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House | Read alone 2022-4
According to The Guardian, as of 2017, 20% of people in the UK lived in poverty. "High-priced renters", "working poverty", "chronic unemployed" and "homeless elderly people" are all the "new poor" phenomena observed by the author Wang Zi among British millennials. After living in England for 12 years, poverty has always been a concern for Wang, and in the book, she laughs at herself that "many of my life tragedies are probably caused by poverty", while sharply pointing out that "the poor are not the culprits of poverty, but its products".
At the same time, according to the 2021 Diet Research Institute's Deaton Inequality Review, the income gap between men and women in the UK has "hardly changed" in the past 25 years. As an ordinary woman, Wang Zi recounts her own experience and asks about the root causes of gender discrimination and social inequality. Why do women who work full-time earn less than full-time men? Why are 85% of the victims of witch hunts women? By tracing the witch hunt in British history to "find scapegoats", Wang analyzes the deep-rooted sexism in society, exposing a top-down atrocity.
Association of Victims of the Same Name
[Japanese] Shimomura Atsushi by Yu Kan Translation
Wenhui Publishing House | Reader Culture 2022-4
Searching for your name on the Internet, but you find yourself preying on the whole network, what should you do? After a brutal murder that stabbed a young girl 28 times, the name of the perpetrator was leaked, and for a time all the people with the same name became the object of suspicion and even anger. Among them are convenience store clerks and rookies in football. In order to return to a normal life, ten people with the same name formed an alliance named after the murderer "Masaki Oyama", vowing to catch the murderer. But during the investigation, they found that every seemingly ordinary person's "Daiyama Shoki" seemed to be hiding some secrets that were not known.
Born in 1981, the author of this book, Atsushi Shimomura, is a new Japanese reasoning genius who won the Edogawa Rambling Award, the supreme honor of Japanese reasoning, for "Lies in the Dark". He pays special attention to the issues of pluralistic society, attaches great importance to the rigor of creative materials and data collection, and firmly believes that "no matter what kind of details, they must be clearly investigated". This book is no exception, he integrates his expertise into the plot, exploring current issues such as public opinion violence and human flesh search.
The Six: Chinese Survivors on the Titanic
Schwank by Preface to Yau, translated
CITIC Publishing Group 2022-4
In the not-so-recent "Saturday Night Live" show, comedian Yang Bowen played the tip of the iceberg in the "Titanic Incident", claiming that he had been wronged for many years, that the sea was the real murderer, and that "he" was also a victim and wanted to justify himself. This is, of course, the effect of the show, and the chinese passengers who were really wronged were the Chinese passengers on the Titanic. Eight people boarded the ship and six survived, but they were portrayed by the media at the time as "stowaways" and "cowards who pretended to be women to seize his chances of survival", and they bore the infamy for more than a hundred years.
American maritime historian and writer Schwank decided to justify the names of the six men. He removed the falsehood from a large number of materials and restored the true identity of the Chinese passengers. A lifeboat was built in equal proportions to reconstruct the experience of Chinese passengers at the time of the incident. He also traveled several times around the world to conduct field investigations, tracing the reasons and where several passengers boarded the ship, breaking down false accusations against them. The encounters of these six passengers may not have been remarkable in the "Titanic incident", but they are a microcosm of the racism and the treatment of Chinese overseas labor at the time.
Biopolitics: Modern State Governance
Zhang Kai
Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press| Bai Deya 2021-1
Zhang Kai, the author of this book, works at the Institute of Culture of the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, engaged in research in French philosophy, cultural studies, and spatial studies. In his preface, he pointed out that the history of power is not the history of the domination or oppression of one part of the people over another, nor the history of the formulation or reform of laws, but the history of the change of power means or technology, a history of what Foucault called "governance".
In the book, Zhang Kai focuses on foucault's important concept of "biopolitics", which is divided into five parts: "Pastoral Power", "The Art of State Governance", "Governance of Population", "Liberal Governance Technique", and "Death Politics", comprehensively exploring Foucault's exposition on "governance" in the mid-to-late 1970s. Wang Min'an, a professor in the Department of Chinese in Tsinghua University's School of Humanities, called the book "an important advance in Foucault's research in China."
"Final Handout: The Most Important Thing a Girl Needs to Know in Her Life"
[Japanese] Nishi Keiko by Guo Jiaqi Translated
Straits Bookstore | Unread Thinker 2022-4
"The Last Lecture Notes" is a popular documentary series on Japan's NHK television station, in which guests talk to the audience with the theme of "If this is the last day of your life, what would you tell?" The book is a complete collection of the speeches of the well-known manga artist Keiko Nishi, in which she talks about her personal experience in a kind tone, and gives her own advice on "the most important things girls need to know in their lives" such as marriage, childbirth, sexual harassment in the workplace, and female poverty.
In the book, Keiko Nishi calls herself an "old lady", and a similar self-deprecation runs through the book. For example, when talking about men, she said that "it is not to teach everyone how to grasp the hearts of men, because I have not grasped them myself", and also called her own comics "bad and vulgar stories", so the house built by the manuscript fee is also a "tax evasion mansion", without any shelf and preaching meaning, like a cute female elder sharing her life experience with you.
Autonomy: Marriage, Law, and Women's Identity in the Chinese Revolution (1940-1960)
By Cong Xiaoping
Social Sciences Academic Press| Qiwei 2022-3
The drama work "Liu Qiao'er", starring Xin Fengxia, the founder of the new school of commentary, tells the story of Liu Qiao'er, a rural girl in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region. Because of his father's greed for money, he instigated Qiao Er to marry the rich man, and Qiao Er was unwilling and fought with him, and finally got what he wanted and married the object of his choice. Taking Liu Qiao'er's prototype Feng Zhiqin's marriage case as a clue and the development of the case as the timeline, the book tells the whole process of the development of a village case into a model of rural governance of the CCP, recreating the social, cultural, legal and political governance of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia revolutionary base area in the 1940s and 1960s.
The author of this book, Cong Xiaoping, graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently a professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Houston, USA, focusing on the fields of 20th-century Chinese society, modern intellectual history, and modern women's history. She observed that the starting point of the marriage reform in the 1940s, "freedom of marriage", had many problems in practice, and in the judicial documents of the time, "marital autonomy" appeared much more frequently than "freedom of marriage". In the book, she traces the change from "freedom" to "autonomy", discusses the differences in etymology, semantics, and grammatical structure of the two words, and what different processes the two words embody in the transformation of modern society.
The Year of Zero Publishing in Germany: Writers, Readers, Bestsellers, the World of Books after the Great Change
Translated by Christian Adam by Linlin Wang/Xiaoyan Li/Ruli Tian
Shaanxi People's Publishing House| First Reading 2022-2
In the early hours of May 7, 1945, Jodl, Chief of Operations of the Wehrmacht High Command, signed the Unconditional Surrender of Germany, marking the end of the European theater of World War II. After the defeat in World War II, Morale in Germany was demoralized and a spiritual crisis was rampant. Some of the masses have set their sights on faith healing, believing in "miracles." Some people turned their attention to books, trying to get solace from them, and the book market flourished. In 1945, the works of Plywell, the chief best-selling author of the East Berlin Construction Press, sold 500,000 copies in a short period of time. This also made the German publishing market after World War II become a "battlefield" again, and Allied propaganda agencies, German secret literary organizations, and writers in exile between Germany and Germany joined the "publishing war" in an attempt to sway the minds of the people.
The author of this book, Christian Adam, is a well-known German historian and cultural scholar who vividly describes the development of this "publishing war" in the book. From sales to book market share, the book cites a large amount of data, in-depth study of the best-selling literature of the two Germans at that time, and cleverly points out the subtle attitudes of both sides in the depiction of the war, allowing readers to look at post-war Germany from a new perspective.
Vegetables in China: An Encyclopedia of Names and Culture
Written by Zhang Pingzhen
Beijing United Publishing Company | Houlang 2022-4
During the pandemic, many people who never enter the kitchen have also begun to learn to cook, but they may face many questions: What is this dish? What is the difference between green onion and garlic seedlings? Which chili peppers are spicy and which are not spicy? In this book, Zhang Zhenping, a graduate of Beijing Agricultural University and former deputy director of the Beijing Vegetable Storage and Processing Institute, details 276 common Chinese vegetables, divided into 18 categories for detail, mentioning more than 5,000 vegetable titles, and accompanied by 181 hand-painted vegetable illustrations, which is believed to help kitchen novices solve their urgent needs.
In addition to the introduction of popular science, as shown in the subtitle "Name Interpretation and Cultural Encyclopedia", the book also mentions many interesting vegetable allusions. Where is spinach home? How did mushroom circles form on the Mongolian steppe during the Ming and Qing dynasties? What kind of vegetables is the "felt" that Su Wu mu sheep swallow when they are hungry? Zhang Zhenping quotes a wide range of historical materials, making a popular science book both professional and interesting.