Rating: 
Summary: Best for those interested in the foreign teacher experience
Review: If you are looking for the "definitive China book," this is not it. Read something else. But if you are interested in how Americans cope with a year or two's posting as a teacher in a Chinese university -- or if you have been, or will be, on such a posting yourself -- you may well enjoy this book.
It's organized as a series of vignettes which average five to ten pages. The vignettes are kind of like diary entries. They describe daily life, bureaucracy, teaching, food, travel, friends, housing, and so forth. This kind of information can be hard to find. Of course the author went to China in the late 1980s, and a lot has changed since then.
This is not a book that was buffed and polished, edited, re-edited, and beautifully designed by a big publishing house looking to make it into a best seller, like Peter Hessler's "River Town." The up side is that it is very genuine and lacks the slightly annoying preciousness of "River Town." It's more like going to a slide presentation at the house of your neighbor who just came back from China, and being handed a photocopy of the journal they kept.
Rating: 
Summary: Witty yet insightful
Review: Is like comparing gelati to ice cream. English professor Bill Holm, Icelander from small-town Minneota, Minnesota provides a travelogue of sorts about his experiences living and teaching in China.The book is often humorous, frequently delightful, and always insightful. I would recommend the book to anyone wanting an inside look at China, and to anyone planning a trip or planning to teach in China. A very enjoyable piece of writing.
Rating:
Summary: Comparing Minnesota to China
Review: Is like comparing gelati to ice cream. English professor Bill Holm, Icelander from small-town Minneota, Minnesota provides a travelogue of sorts about his experiences living and teaching in China. The book is often humorous, frequently delightful, and always insightful. I would recommend the book to anyone wanting an inside look at China, and to anyone planning a trip or planning to teach in China. A very enjoyable piece of writing.
Rating:
Summary: Another Bill Holm Delight
Review: Minneota, Minnesota writer and poet Bill Holm shares his essays on his teaching experience and life in China. By creatively covering China's government, food, music, bureaucracy, arts, transportation, tickets, and night soil, Holm portrays a backwards, poor, xenophobic police state in which the conditions were ripe for the Tianamen Square uprising and resulting massacre. Holm's book offers rare insight into Chinese daily life as it really is.
Rating:
Summary: Another Bill Holm Delight
Review: Mr. Holm fills this book about China with amazing insight, stories of daily life and blood stirring tales about people trying to keep alive ideas that Americans have allowed to die and rot. What do we know about freedoms? The author shows us a nation where the people are willing to smuggle in books, learn other languages and even take in foreign ideas while living under a government that is more than willing to punish them for doing so. A nation that treat the kids like gems and the adults like resources. A nation that has recycled everything, from people to soil to noodles for thousands of years and will continue to do so forever. A book not only about Chinese culture but also about American thought.
Rating:
Summary: Great, fun, and makes you think!
Review: Mr. Holm fills this book about China with amazing insight, stories of daily life and blood stirring tales about people trying to keep alive ideas that Americans have allowed to die and rot. What do we know about freedoms? The author shows us a nation where the people are willing to smuggle in books, learn other languages and even take in foreign ideas while living under a government that is more than willing to punish them for doing so. A nation that treat the kids like gems and the adults like resources. A nation that has recycled everything, from people to soil to noodles for thousands of years and will continue to do so forever. A book not only about Chinese culture but also about American thought.
Rating: 
Summary: Mr Bill, there is NO story.
Review: The book is his memoirs on a 1-year stint teaching American lit in China in the late 80s. As an illiterate, incommunicado, ill-prepared, ethnocentric Minnesota round-eye with dubious Scandahovian heritage, he tries to explain a 50 something idiosyncratic Communist China. The author's point of view is from an overweight, middle aged, unmarried, intellectual with no children [himself one of China's unmentionable damn ninths]. The era is after Mao's Cultural Revolution where China was coming out of its isolationist phase under Deng Xiaoping, just before its pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen, and prosperous capitalism with Chinese characteristics of the 90s. The author ostensibly and defensively disclaims anything other than to be a personal travelog on the back cover and introduction. This book is a collection of essays, trying to subvert his tired, same-old-drivel, Anglo cliches into an authoritative dictionary format. Each definition compares and contrasts China with a smooth and creamy Minnesotan hot dish, with bulked-up dialog that is analyzed-to-death, backwards, upside down, and inside out, ad nauseam. Certainly a hunk of butter could have provided an easier enema. Attempts at humor were by jumping on a tube of Aquafresh. The book has 250 pages, no pictures or maps, and the introduction is huge 30 pages. And because of the format, many scenes and factoids are repeated throughout the book. In his typical 3 page vignetted definitions of Chineseness, the self-centered, exhalted one claims that his green AmEx card cures all ills. A single paragraph on staring mobs, latrines, yellow dust, corruption, two tier pricing, bureaucratic insolence, yada, yada, yada. Indeed, a detailed table would do...but then no book. Half of the subjects were based in the ancient city of terra cotta warriors where he taught and the other half is his travels into, out of China, down the Yangtze river, in Singapore, and back in the ol' US of A. The book does not discuss his actual job of teaching very much. The more memorable, pleasant experiences center on food, dim sum, tasty veggies, and very ducky banquets. I am amazed to see how so many MN Foundations were conned to support this out-state ersatz college American lit professor's charade to get this work published, read: vanity subsidy press. I read his book from a local library in his home state which has many copies. As an alternative, I'd highly recommend Peter Hessler's Rivertown, 0060953748, 2001, who does the same thing teaching English/American lit for 2 yrs as a Peace Corp volunteer. Covers the same ground but crafts his rewarding teaching experience into a cohesive story. As for travels, Paul Theroux's Riding the Iron Rooster, 0-8041-0454-9, 1988, does a more credible [450 pages with map] job during the same era [16 wks on NYTimes bestseller list].
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and very well written
Review: This book by Holm is excellent and offers many funny accounts of his one year stay in the Middle Kingdom. Holm is a masterful writer who was able to put many aspects of China's complex and often confusing culture into a Western perspective that we can all relate to. After spending a year in China myself, I found Holm's stories refreshing and very true to life. Highly suggest this quick read.
Rating: 
Summary: A captivating journey through contemporary China.
Review: With Holm as companion, one learns what it is like to travel by "hard-seat" train to a remote village, to smuggle Chinese classics back into China, and to experience Mickey Mouse-mania in the Middle Kingdom."Holm provides a warm, wise and unrelentingly witty guide to surviving China."--San Diego Magazine"Holm's view is entertaining, thought-provoking and touching. After reading his book, you won't look at the United States or China the same way."--Philadelphia Inquirer"I loved it. It is the best book on China I have read for a long time."--Nien Cheng, author of Life and Death in Shangha
|
