Reviews for Appleman on Insurance Law and Practice/ Holmes and Appleman on Insurance

The average rating for Appleman on Insurance Law and Practice/ Holmes and Appleman on Insurance based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-12 00:00:00 Susana Ortiz Compressing a few thousand years of history into a few hundred pages isn't an easy task, and Cotterell does a respectable job. There are moments in the book when I was reminded of the quip that history 'is just one damn thing after another', and I was left wanting more depth, detail and colour. But an attempt to tell China's whole story in less than 400 pages will never realistically be able to deliver that. The author's main success is that he creates a meaningful narrative out of China's history by selecting particular threads of the tapestry and following them through. One of these is Confucianism: a set of ideas that has fallen out of fashion at many times during China's history, most recently under Chairman Mao, but has always reasserted itself - though leaders have always used it for their own ends. Another running theme is the difficulty China's rulers have faced in holding together such a vast and diverse country (empire), which we discover is by no means unique to the present day, but a problem that runs right back into its ancient history. Some dynasties resorted to harsh, repressive regimes: the doctrine of Legalism that flourished in the Qin dynasty, for example, held that obedience to the letter of the law was of paramount importance, requiring severe punishments for trivial transgressions. Other emperors and their advisers took a more pragmatic approach, which was generally more successful. The Chinese people may be remarkably malleable, but every time they have been pushed too hard, Cotterell argues, they have pushed back with fatal consequences for those in power. (China's current leaders must be acutely aware of this.) China's examination system, copied all over the world, is another interesting strand of its civilisation. Originally, it was a cornerstone of China's meritocracy, allowing the talented to flourish and contribute to the nation's prosperity - a defence against nepotism and the stagnation of thought that comes with a lack of social mobility. But under the later dynasties, it became ossified, a relic of the past that served to entrench outdated ways of thinking. Competition for a job in China's bureaucracy became so intense that there were thousands of candidates for each place, with scholars driven half-mad with studying. We can recognise in this both the good and the bad aspects of China's current education system. China, or parts of China, have been invaded many times - it is painful to remember the foreign 'concessions' in cities such as Shanghai, and the naked exploitation of the Opium Wars that Gladstone correctly suggested would 'cover [Britain] with permanent disgrace'. The Manchus, Mongols and Tartars all got there before the Europeans, of course, and the enormities of the Japanese leave the rawest scars. But as Cotterell clearly illustrates, none of these incursions managed to alter the fundamental 'Chinese-ness' of China. The Mongols perhaps came closest to imposing an alien culture on the Chinese during the Yuan dynasty, but despite going on nearly a century, it had surprisingly little lasting influence. (This was the time when Marco Polo visited China; the fact that he served as governor of Yangzhou was due in part to the Mongols' preference for non-Chinese in powerful positions.) The enduring nature of Chinese culture and civilisation is one of the things that makes the country fascinating, especially as it reinvents itself in the twenty-first century, reclaiming the dominant position it enjoyed for so much of its history, and so disastrously lost in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cotterell's book is probably as good a starting place as any for those who want to understand China better by gaining an appreciation of its rich and eventful past.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-04-27 00:00:00 James Reeve This book was about as thorough and well-written for a book about the complete history of China can be in less than 500 pages. I'm in the middle of the road regarding this book. While it was informative and got the job done, that being to teach me about the history of China, I felt it was lacking pieces throughout, so not great but not bad either. 3/5