Reviews for Looking at China

The average rating for Looking at China based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-25 00:00:00 Ernest Fontaine Oh, this book, this book. It is such an excellent concept and so poorly executed. The largest problem with this book, far overshadowing the quibbles I had with some of the content, is that it was clearly not copyedited. Punctuation errors abound, and there are sentences which look like they were poorly typset (which in this day perhaps means a copy-paste error?) in that they repeat words or phrases in a way that makes them nonsensical. There are some truly bad sentences as well, poorly formed or too repetitive, but it is hard to know if this is Marsh being a poor writer or if it might be another form of editing/printing error. The actual content itself is difficult to appreciate due to all of these errors, but Marsh really does make an attempt to teach the reader how to read and appreciate Shakespeare, using a variety of tools, and I think that is marvelous. Where the book falls apart is when Marsh begins writing about the social background; I know it is a short book, and he is not a historian, but he depicts a simplified idea of 'medieval vs. early modern' and asserts that the divine right of kings was a medieval tradition that was being shaken up in the early modern period, which so far as I recall from my own education is just wrong. (Divine right & absolute monarchy was instead a /reaction/ in the early modern period to the shifts which had been happening over the last centuries.) I was also surprised he made no mention of the 14th century Black Death & how it changed the position of rural labourers and all of that, since so far as I know (which may of course be wrong) it is still seen as one of the major factors in England's transition to urbanisation. So, the history seemed simplified, incomplete and sometimes outright wrong, and this for me made me trust the rest of the book less. Finally, his overview of the critics was poorly done. I read a critical version of Kate Chopin's The Awakening many years ago that did a fantastic job of this, devoting perhaps a paragraph to various schools of criticism, and then providing longer samples. It does not do anything to give five critical views of Shakespeare's works and not explain the critical position they are being written from, it is just cacophony of voices. I am also irritated that despite his attempts throughout the book to talk about women, he picks 5 critics, only one of whom is female -- the feminist one, of course.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-04-02 00:00:00 Vance Gosselin Takes us out of our modern context and deepens the scope of what can be understood and admired in Homer. For me, Achilles is the essential, fundamental Other -- maybe because he's so complete. We envy Achilles his completeness because, I think, we don't recognize that its price is sorrow, and since we can't imagine a valid justification for divine rage, we find it hard to admire him. Hector, human in his incompleteness, can easily inspire our admiration -- but not our envy.