Blue-collar and white-collar workers are all screws, and they will slip outside the mainstream if they are not careful Weekly new book recommendations
Interface News Reporter | Xu Luqing
Interface News Editor | Yellow Moon
"My Mother Cleans"
Zhang Xiaoman
Kuang-Chi Bookstore 2023-11
Zhang Xiaoman used to be a journalist and later worked in a large factory in Shenzhen. Chunxiang is Zhang Xiaoman's mother, who used to work in mines and construction sites, and later came to Shenzhen to work as a cleaner in an office building. Zhang Xiaoman and Chunxiang live under the same roof, and she wants to record her mother's part-time job history.
"You may hardly imagine that in a high-end office building in Shenzhen, a cleaner needs nearly 30 tools to do his job. In the book "My Mother Cleans", Zhang Xiaoman tries to uncover the small realities of contemporary urban operation. The mother works eight hours a day, from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., with four days off per month, with a monthly salary of 2,500 yuan, no five insurances and one housing fund, just exceeding the minimum wage of 2,200 yuan per month for full-time workers in Shenzhen. This salary is remitted to Chunxiang's salary card every month, and Xiaoman writes:
For the first time in her life, my mother had her own professional name: cleaner. Even though she's only a cleaner, she's happy to have finally found a job and is looking forward to the day when she'll get paid – the first time her salary has been credited to her bank card on time. Every time she got paid before, it was cash. ”
One is a blue-collar worker in manual labor, and the other is a white-collar worker who has jumped into the "decent class", and in the process of recording the story of the cleaner group between the mother and daughter, Zhang Xiaoman was able to look back at where he came from. She felt more and more that many of her seemingly hard-working behaviors and seemingly exposed circles were actually vulnerable, and her mother also realized with sadness in the process that her hard-working children would eventually be just struggling to maintain a screw-like job in urban life, and if they were not careful, they would also slip outside the "mainstream life".
"Untold"
[Germany] by Winfried Sebald [Germany] Illustrated by Jan Peter Tripp Translated by Ren Yupu
Guangxi Normal University Press, 2023-9
Sebald is one of the most discussed writers in contemporary Germanic literature, and his work often explores memory and memory, the significance of figurative discourse (photographs) to history and memory, pictorial language, and intertextuality and the intermingling of different media. Most of his outsiders, wanderers, and wanderers who have left their homeland to find a new life in a foreign land, just like him. The German-Jewish legacy also occupies an important place in his work.
This book is a unique endeavor by Sebald and was co-authored with his old friend, the German artist Jan Peter Tripp. The 33 prints on the subject of eyes are from Tripp, the eyes of Rembrandt, Bacon, Borges, Beckett, Proust, Sebald, and others, and perhaps the most emotionally charged are the eyes of Sebald's daughter, who later suffered a car accident with her father, for whom Sebald wrote 33 short poems.
The Freedom of Being a Mother: I Don't Want to Be a Mom
Written by Choi Zhien and translated by Kan Zi
Zhejiang Education Press, 2023-9
"I don't want to be a mom. Choi Ji-eun, who is about to turn 40 years old, is a childless married woman who has been married to her husband for 5 years, and she decided to openly say that she does not want to have children.
She wondered how others who had made the same choice had finally come out of their inner struggles and low tides. In "The Freedom of Motherhood", Choi interviews 17 women of different ages and marriageable ages, ranging from discussing "I am the one who gave birth to the child, why don't I have the consent of others", to asking "is South Korea a suitable country for childbearing" and "Is it necessary to revise the policy for Dink couples". Cui Zhien found that from pregnancy to childbirth, women are responsible alone, and most of the future parenting and upbringing responsibilities fall on the shoulders of women, and the risks and responsibilities borne along the way are far beyond the imagination of others. Therefore, women who choose not to have children should not feel guilty or guilty, let alone blamed.
Choi is a South Korean journalist and writer who has been focusing on women's issues for many years. Once published, the book's topicality and attention sparked heated discussions in South Korea and spread to Japan, where NHK TV produced a documentary of the same name, "I Don't Want to Be a Mother: The Impact of Seoul's Fertility Rate of 0.64".
Post-Truth
Written by Lee McIntyre, translated by Zhang Meihua and Xiang Xinyi
RESONANCE BEIJING JOINT PUBLISHING COMPANY 2023-10
Smoking doesn't cause cancer, vaccines are disabled, global warming is a conspiracy of developed countries, and what should we believe?
The "after" of "post-truth" is because truth has been relegated to a secondary position, and different groups of people choose to believe only information that matches their respective preferences. Post-truth discourse, which is often opposed to scientific methods and investigations, gained widespread popularity in the form of "post-truth politics" around the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit referendum and was named the 2016 Word of the Year by the Oxford Dictionary.
From the denial of scientific facts about smoking, vaccines, evolution, and climate change, to the psychological roots of cognitive biases, from the islands of information shaped by social media, to the philosophical perspectives of postmodernism, Post-Truth traces the roots of these phenomena. Lee McIntyre, an author and lecturer in ethics at Harvard Extension, argues that the danger of post-truth is not only that truth is challenged as a result, but that challenging truth becomes a mechanism for maintaining political dominance. If we want to understand the "basics" of the post-truth concept, there is no way to avoid politics.
The Hidden Beauty of Seeds
Written by Levin Biss and translated by Li Yongxue
Purui Culture, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House 2023-10-10
The Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh houses more than 3 million dried plant specimens collected from around the world over 300 years. Throughout history, scientists have continued to use herbariums to discover the diversity of plants and fungi. Over the past decade, scientists have also digitized one-sixth of the specimens here through high-resolution image acquisition, each with a ruler (illustrative scale) and a color card, and freely available on the Internet. Researchers from all over the world can observe the material in the Edinburgh specimen cabinet and download the images and associated acquisition data.
As a pioneer of ultra-macro photography of insects, British photographer Levine Bees, the initiator of the "microsculpture" project, was invited by the Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh to select 100 kinds of fruits and seeds from the seed bank of the botanic garden for macro photography, and these pictures are included in this book "The Hidden Beauty of Seeds". He magnified the subject up to 80 times, revealing many seed textures and textures that are difficult to see with the naked eye, and each seed picture is accompanied by a popular science text.
Femininity Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Yuriko Miyamoto's Essays
Yuriko Miyamoto by Peng Qing Translation
Hou Lang· Guizhou People's Publishing House 2023-11
"Venus is often seen as an ornament, a woman to be gazed at, and the smile of the Mona Lisa is not the smile of a liberated woman, her smile reflects her unconscious, unspoken heart... The Renaissance gave the Mona Lisa the freedom to have that smile, but it controlled her social actions as an independent woman. ”
In "Femininity Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow", the modern Japanese writer Yuriko Miyamoto analyzes the views on women of famous male writers such as Natsume Soseki, Mori Ouwai, and Tolstoy, as well as the way of existence and creative attitude of women in their writings, and truly "sees" women in literary masterpieces.
Yuriko Miyamoto is an important writer in modern Japanese literature, who participated in the establishment of the New Japan Literature Society after World War II and actively carried out the women's literary movement. Despite several arrests and bans on publishing her work, she continued to write while in prison, writing numerous novels and critical essays, and continuing to publish articles on politics, social issues, labor rights, and women's consciousness.
In Search of Our Fish Ancestors: The Mystery of Evolution 400 Million Years Ago
Written by Samantha Weinberg Translated by Lu Jing
The Commercial Press 2023-10
The Latimai fish is a fish that has swam from 400 million years ago to the present.
It managed to survive four mass extinctions, and was once thought to be extinct with the dinosaurs, but was discovered in the 30s of the 20th century. It is a key species representative of the evolution from fish to early amphibians, and the flesh-finned fish to which it belongs is considered the ancestor of all terrestrial vertebrates.
In "In Search of Our Fish Ancestors", the author travels to many countries to investigate the discovery of the Latimai fish and its subsequent impact, and tells the story of the sensational scientific discovery that caused waves on a global scale. From Miss Latimeier's chance to see this mysterious blue fish from fishermen, to the Smiths who went out to sea to search for fish for research, to island fishermen flocking to the island for high rewards, to the major museums starting to carry out crazy fishing operations to own a Latimai fish, and the political circles of various countries have also enacted laws and regulations for the ownership of the fish... The discovery of species not only brings a sensation to the scientific community, but also maps different sides of the world.
Women on the Margins: Three Life Stories from the Seventeenth Century
[Canada] by Natalie Zemon Davis Translated by Li Weilu
Guangxi Normal University Press, 2023-11
Glickell, a deviant and businessman, wrote a seven-volume autobiography.
Marie Guy devoted herself to education and philanthropy, reclaiming spiritual and material wastelands in the New World.
Maria Merion, an artist and naturalist, studies her beloved caterpillar every day.
These are the three protagonists of "Women on the Edge", who are neither nobles nor overwhelmed by their motherhood and erased as wives. They were ordinary women in the 17th century, living on the "periphery" of Europe, North and South America. The book's author, Canadian historian Natalie Zemon Davis, traces the lives of respondents in a variety of areas, from monasteries to new frontiers, from homes to markets, from fields to drawing boards, in an attempt to fill in the conceptual framework of early modern women's history. Davis found that the three ordinary women on the "edge" had slightly shaken the indestructible male world.
The female historian Davis, who died in October this year, is considered an important representative of microhistoriography, and her masterpiece also includes The Return of Martin Gale. In recent years, microhistoriography has received more and more attention in China, including Cheese and Maggots: The Universe of a 16th-Century Miller, Montayou, and The Teahouse: Public Life and Microcosm in Chengdu, 1900-1950.