Rating: 
Summary: A complete history of all 214 essential calligraphic letters
Review: Chinese Calligraphy by Edoardo Fazzioli provides a complete history of all 214 essential Chinese and Japanese calligraphic letters. Highly recommended for a specialized audience of college-level students in either language or art.
Rating: 
Summary: Childish Scripts
Review: I am Chinese and I have practise the art. The scripts on the book look unbalanced, as if a child has written it. My advice to the author is:
read the masters, ... Honestly, the modern "standard" (Kai Su) style is the hardest to master, harder even than the "grass" or "walking" (cursive) styles, because the balance between stability and fluidity is very subtle.
The best way to start is from either "Sun Su" or "Dae Su", which are more stable and solid, where balance is easier to obtain, and whose strokes are also simpler.
Rating:
Summary: Childish Scripts
Review: I am Chinese and I have practise the art. The scripts on the book look unbalanced, as if a child has written it. My advice to the author is:
read the masters, ... Honestly, the modern "standard" (Kai Su) style is the hardest to master, harder even than the "grass" or "walking" (cursive) styles, because the balance between stability and fluidity is very subtle.
The best way to start is from either "Sun Su" or "Dae Su", which are more stable and solid, where balance is easier to obtain, and whose strokes are also simpler.
Rating:
Summary: Childish Scripts
Review: I am Chinese and I have practise the art. The scripts on the book look unbalanced, as if a child has written it. My advice to the author is:
read the masters, ...Honestly, the modern "standard" (Kai Su) style is the hardest to master, harder even than the "grass" or "walking" (cursive) styles, because the balance between stability and fluidity is very subtle.
The best way to start is from either "Sun Su" or "Dae Su", which are more stable and solid, where balance is easier to obtain, and whose strokes are also simpler.
Rating:
Summary: Not finished
Review: I gave this book 5 stars but I really don't know how to judge it. I bought it because I want to learn to read Chinese and I have to start somewhere. So far I am up to the 100th 'radical' and am finding it very difficult to memorize them. My hope is that eventually they will start to come together, as when putting 'wrong' and 'heart' together, you get the sign for sadness, or 'woman' beneath 'roof' gives you peace. At this point I really don't even know what a radical is. My hope is that knowing the radicals will enable me to look up words in a chinese to english dictionary so I can start translating written chinese.
Rating: 
Summary: One of a kind...but definitely not Japanese
Review: I have been inspired by this book to pursue the study of Chinese characters to a deeper level. On the other hand, the more I read and compare it to other resources on the same subject, the more critical I become.
This book has inspired me to a deeper study of Chinese radicals (for a better understanding of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). The result - I've found it makes a great stepping stone, and can be used for comparative analysis of the surprising variety of information available to English speakers mostly through the internet, or through native language dictionaries for those with access, but it should NOT be relied upon as a single source for learning, teaching, or research. It is reasonably educational and artistic, but not authoritative.
Even though I love this book and go back to it occasionally, there is one huge glaring error, to the point of unethical advertising, starting on the cover of the book. The title misleadingly contains the word "Japanese." Although Chinese characters are an important part of the Japanese language, it contains NOTHING about Japanese. You would have to be aware of Japanese independently of this book in order to make the connection that is made ONLY in the title. It is an English language book explaining aspects of Chinese, with the use of simplified characters created by the Peoples Republic of China as examples - although the simplified PRC characters bear some resemblance to the traditional characters that are mostly used in Japan, they are not the same, therefore making this book less useful for dedicated students of Japanese.
Anyway, despite this beef with the title and the fact that it should not be used a sole source for academic pursuit, it has many more merits than demerits. Since it is one of the very few books dedicated to this specific subject as well, the uniqueness adds a little to its value.
Rating:
Summary: An interesting study
Review: I like this book, and so I'm giving it 4 stars, but that is not to say that the criticisms of it are without merit.Firstly, this book has absolutely nothing to do with learning the Chinese language. You will not be able to read Chinese from buying this book, and it will be impossible to study the language, since there is no systemitized presentation of the language. What this book instead does is presents an interesting geneology of some fairly common, culturaly relevant, or visualy interesting characters. For people who already know some Chinese, or for people who are interested in evolutions of writting systems or graphic design, this is not a bad book. There are some strange inconsistencies, but I have a theory that explains them. First, the book inconsitently presents some characters in simplified form, while others are in traditional form. Second, criticisms of the caligraphy are fair. They have heart, but it is not really outstanding, and certainly not something to be emulated. From these two problems, I concluded that the book was not a product of the Chinese mainland, Xiang Gang (Hong Kong), or Taiwan, since such inconsitencies would have been corrected. If you do some checking, that's because it isn't. As you probably could have guessed by the author's name, it's an Italian book. The Italian author worked with a Japanese illustrator to compile the book. Japanese Kanji are Chinese characters adopted into the Japanese language, but they have been isolated from Chinese for centuries. As a result, some of the more complex characters have been simplified. Simplification of Chinese characters started long before Mao made them standard in the PRC. Infact, they are generaly based on cursive and calligraphic short-hands developed by people who had to write a lot, or who were not educated enough to constantly be in need of writting formal characters. Many characters have been simplified from their original forms even in the so called "Traditional" character set (Fanti Zi) such as the numbers, and the Tai in Taiwan. The original, complex numbers used in formal Chinese can still be found on currency, mostly to confound counterfiters. Some characters, such as Li, meaning 'inside,' or Zhen, meaning 'real' can be found written one way, but typed in a less simplified way. Simplification in pre-Mao Chinese was common, but not standardized. When Mao standardized all the characters for the PRC, he took all of the commonly simplified characters, as well as simplifying some other, more complex characters with whole new sets of visual symbolism, some time to enhance the 'phonetic' part of the character, so that it is easier to guess the sound of the word. The characters 'ren' and 'shi,' together meaning 'to come to know' are great examples of this. Japanese characters are written without these contemporary simplifications since they were linguisticly isolated from Chinese by the 20th century, but reflect many common older simplifications. An prime example of this is the character 'ya' used in 'yazhou' for Asia, or otherwise just meaning second. It is rather dificult to write aestheticaly in Traditional Characters, but in Simplified Characters (Jianti Zi) it is much much easier, if not as beautifull. On the other hand, the correspondent Japanese Kanji is written in the old hand-written style. Needless to say, the Japanese also have different aesthetic standards from the Chinese. The use of Japanese is not at all uncommon in earlier European Sinology. Ezera Pound, for instance, in translating the works of Li Bai (Also called Li Po, or Li Bo, as it was pronounced during the Tang Dynasty) actualy translated an Italian manuscript which itself was translated from a Japanese copy of the Chinese Poet's famous writtings. This circuitious route would explain some of the, er, to put it kindly, eccentricities of Pound's translations, and it explains some of the inconsistencies in this book. There are many things this book is not: it is not an introduction to Chinese. It is not an instructional book on how to paint calligraphy. It is not a comprehensive academic study of the Chinese system of writting. As long as you accept it for what it is, though, and don't mistake it for something it's not, this is a pleasant book. The characters are more or less acurately explained, and they are organized according to important cultural themes. Thus, it is a nice primer on the subject of the esoteric meanings and evolutions of Chinese characters for the casual (not academic) student. There are better books I've read on the subject, but they are all in Chinese.
Rating:
Summary: ... if you know what you're doing.
Review: I was ecstatic to find this book! It is more than just a dictionary reference with cut-and-dry Pin Yin to English translations. For each of the 214 radicals, you get a nice story explaining the history of the radical along with illustrations of the character's evolution from ancient pictographs to its current form. There is also a step-by-step demonstration on how the strokes are arranged including what order and what stroke (if they do not already come naturally to you). And if all that weren't enough, each page has short list of characters that use a particular radical so you can see the radicals in action. This book is definitely useful if you are fascinated by the cultural depictions in traditional Chinese writing. You will be learning things even literate Chinese folks don't know. However, this book probably won't help you much if you are an absolute beginner. For best results, you should at least have a working knowledge to build off of.
Rating:
Summary: Fun,exciting,and very interesting
Review: If you respond to the beauty of Chinese calligraphy then this book is an enlightening introduction. Having no formal background in the subject, I can't debate the merits of Fazzioli's scholarship, but for aesthetic reasons I give it five stars.
Rating:
Summary: Unveiling the intricacies of Chinese characters
Review: If you respond to the beauty of Chinese calligraphy then this book is an enlightening introduction. Having no formal background in the subject, I can't debate the merits of Fazzioli's scholarship, but for aesthetic reasons I give it five stars.
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