Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother requires a certain flexibility of thought. The premise involves contrasting “American parents” and “Chinese parents” using experiences from Chua’s life bringing up her two daughters. But the narrative opens a hornet’s nest of questions: What is the purpose of childhood? Can what is deemed cruel in one culture be kind in another? If you had to choose between enjoying your life and doing something special with your life, is one choice more moral than the other? What if the choice was not for your own life but for your child’s?
If Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was an easy book for you to read and process, you probably missed most of the nuance. The characters’ lives are filled with mindless simplification: sweeping generalizations, unwarranted dramatics, blind ambition, and false dichotomies. Chua does not appear to be a very reflective subtle person until you realize that in writing the book she is being very subtle and reflective about her lack of subtlety. Then you realize that your own response is not a simple response to a narrative but also a knee-jerk reaction to your own life as both a parent and a child.
Read it with your fiance, with your teenaged child, with your mother after you are grown and out on your own. Then talk. It asks for reflection and conversation, not just a gut response (though you will probably have one of those, too).
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I’m now offering electronic autographs for Clare and Western Herbs via Kindlegraph. So far these autographs are available on the Kindle, but I have to admit the technology is pretty cool. Check it out.
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Below Stairs: The Classic Kitchen Maid’s Memoir That Inspired “Upstairs, Downstairs” and “Downton Abbey” by Margaret Powell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The cover of the book compares Below Stairs to “Downton Abbey” and “Upstairs, Downstairs.” In fact, the image of Daisy, the kitchen maid in “Downton Abbey” kept floating through my mind as I read. But what this book has that the two series don’t is a closely wrought picture of the life and heart of a kitchen maid. We see images of young Margaret, new to service, polishing the front door brass until her hands swell with chillblains, only to be dragged in front of the mistress of the house for a dressing down regarding the bits she missed. In Margaret Powell’s stories, we see not only how tough the work was, but the toughness of mind and the emotional calluses that she needed to form to do that work. She tells the story in simple, straightforward, almost childlike prose, but the detailed pictures she painted drew me in and made me ask the question of whether I could have survived the work and the indignities as well as she did.
Susan Lynn Peterson
author of Clare: A Novel
a story of Irish immigration in the early 20th century
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Dukkha: The Suffering by Loren W. Christensen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Not many people can write both fiction and nonfiction well. Loren Christensen can. I’ve been reading his nonfiction for some time now, and have always found it straight-forward and informative. His new novel, Dukkha, has a similar no-nonsense feel to it. His fight scenes are hard and realistic, and so is his look at the inner world of his protagonist, a cop suffering after having to shoot someone in the line of duty. I don’t normally read thrillers, but I picked this one up because of my interest in martial arts. I have to admit I lost a couple hours of sleep to it. I had that much trouble putting it down. It’s a nicely done debut novel.
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When I was a beginning student sometimes high ranking black belts would come to the dojo to visit, teach, or train. I discovered that if you hung around after class and asked a few leading questions, sometimes the visiting black belt would open a new world to you: stories about his teachers or about masters now gone, techniques for strengthening a particular part of the body, martial philosophy and psychology, new ways of looking at old techniques, or challenges to think about and test yourself against. Shin Gi Tai: Karate Training for Body, Mind, and Spirit
The contest at Goodreads is over. Congratulations to the winners: Beth Anne, Janet, and Marie.
To say thanks to everyone who entered, I’m issuing some special coupons that will be good through the end of the year. (Think end of the year gift giving!)
Buzz on over to the and enter the publisher’s Web page on CreateSpace and enter the code 8DH78R8R to get 20% off the cover price.
Would you rather read it on your e-reader? We have you covered on Smashwords. Enter the code JE56V to get 20% off the already low price of $4.99
The coupons expire at midnight on January 1. Thanks, everyone for your interest!
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I’ve just launched the second in the Alcuin Classics series, the Yin Chih Wen: The Tract Of The Quiet Way. It’s available on Kindle. Check it out on Amazon.com.
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I’ve just released what I hope will be the first in a series of out of print classics scanned, edited, and adapted for Kindle. Check it out. If you are interested in seeing these texts adapted for other ebook formats, let me know.
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Win a free copy of Clare at Goodreads. Know someone who likes historical fiction? Send them the link!
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The Way of the Sword by Chris Bradford
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’ve read the first two in the Young Samurai
Series. Let me say, first of all, that I enjoyed them. They are young adult books, but they are decent light reading for adults who don’t take their martial arts novels too seriously. They are, however, shameless in their cribbing of popular motifs.
The Young Samurai books are what you get when you cross James Clavell’s “Shogun” with the Harry Potter novels. See if this sounds familiar: a European stranded in Japan is adopted by a powerful samurai and becomes samurai himself. There are a stolen rutter, a Catholic priest complete with Japanese dictionary, ninja attacks and gifts of swords to cement alliances. There is also a teenaged boy with two friends, a boy and a girl, at a special boarding school, chased by an incredibly powerful adult, menaced by a boy at his school, facing trials to prove his skills. It’s Harry Potter with kimonos and katanas.
“The Way of the Sword” is, however, a good read. And though it is not a slave to cultural accuracy, it has more than just sword battles. A good chunk of it is devoted to mind-body training and the internal aspects of the martial arts. I’ll read the rest of the Young Samurai novels when they come to my local library’s digital collection. They’re interesting, exciting, and they make me want to get up and do kata.
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