This week's "New Book of the Week" is meeting readers again. In this column, we will not only list good books to write a recommendation, but we will also give our own opinions on books that readers are concerned about or have just published, as far as possible within the scope of our own reading efficiency. If the content of a new book is very exciting, we will spare no effort to recommend it, and if the content of a book does not match its attention, we will also express our opinions unreservedly in the reference opinion. In order to more intuitively see our attitude towards a book, we will also add a "recommendation index", similar to the Douban score.
Of course, the judgment of any reading is personal, and our opinions may not be correct, and may even be biased, but they must be sincere. We're just providing a reference and hope to provide readers with a guide to reading (after all, this may also risk offending the publisher). If you have a new book that you are more hesitant about and want to know our attitude, please leave a comment in the comment area, and we will give our opinions as soon as possible.
This issue is presided over | the editorial department of Beijing News Book Review Weekly
literature
How to Travel with Salmon
Author: [Italian] Umberto Echo
Translator: Chen Ying
Edition: Shanghai Translation Publishing House
March 2022
Recommendation Index: ★★★★ ☆
Recommended by: Miyako
How to Travel with Salmon is a new translation of Echo's work, previously titled "Traveling with Salmon." The book is one of Echo's more classic works, and its irony and gags are impressive. In his book, Echo analyzes questions that no one would ever think about, such as how to eat on an airplane or how to read a product manual. Most of the things he was going to discuss had become habits of life. However, it is precisely those thoughtless reflections on these questions that recapture the characteristics of modern life in the unconscious. In his discussion, Echo continues his usual humor and wit, analyzing the irrational phenomena in modern life and the psychology behind them. Of course, some of them are outdated, such as Echo's sarcastic writing in "How to Avoid Using Mobile Phones" that always looking at mobile phones is a characteristic of upstarts, real tycoons do not answer every phone, they will let others help them deal with it, and there are people who buy a fake mobile phone to satisfy their vanity, etc., which are limited to the era when mobile phones first became popular. Today, people's mobile phone dependence really has little to do with vanity.
The interesting thing about this book is two points, one is echoed by Echo, which allows us to improve the sensitivity of observing real life, and the other is that it allows us to see the problems that many scholars worry about, but in fact, it is a situation that does not have to worry, and perhaps in less than ten years, many problems will enter new situations with the changes in social life. Either way, the implications it brings will be interesting.
culture
Paradise Hill: A History of the Birth and Disenfranchisement of Power
Author: [Dutch] Minnick Hipper
Translator: Wang Wanming
Edition: Guangxi Normal University Press
Recommended by: Qingqingzi
Myths influence and construct many of our perceptions of ourselves and the world. Over the course of time, myths are rewritten and restated, projecting the desire of those in power to establish and consolidate order. Mythology is a history of longing and a history of fear. From the creation myth to the origin of mankind, from regional culture to religious belief, myths never only tell the past, but also the present. Dutch scholar Minik Hipper's "Paradise Hill" traces how the myths and prejudices about the female body have gradually taken shape and continued through generations of mythology.
The title of "The Hill of Paradise" comes from a song written by a medieval student: "Softly radiating light / Her virgin bosom / Breasts rise soothingly / Like the Hill of Paradise / Oh, the joy of having it ..." As the song shows, it praises the beauty of the female body while declaring that "her naked body is being examined, touched, described and praised by men, and is a male possession." And as the title suggests, most of the content that is spoken or written about women's bodies comes from sources provided by men, or is swayed by men's perspectives. And if we re-examine the countless images, stories, signs, rituals and commentaries that have been passed down from a female perspective and focus on the difference between men and women, it is not difficult to find that the female body, especially about the breasts, vagina, uterus, menstruation, childbirth, and breastfeeding, is accompanied by the loss of women's power, as well as the uneasiness, control and fear of women's physical strength in patriarchal society.
It is worth mentioning that this book does not stop at the interpretation of history. In the second half of the book, Hipper asks a more immediate question: Where is your current position as a modern woman in the long history of power to powerlessness? From the re-analysis of various incidents of gender-based violence to the recent #MeToo movement and its impact, Hippo reminds us that old misconceptions are still spreading confusing ideas and are misinterpreted by both sides. While gender power relations are undergoing subtle shifts, the weight of the past carried by myths still plays an impact behind contemporary realities. It is also in this sense that in order to understand the present, we need to understand the past.
Knowledge
"New Motherhood"
Author: [English] Ann Oakley
Translator: Wang Yingchen
Edition: Nanjing University Press
January 2022
Recommended by: Shen Chan
Becoming a mother is both an "experience" and a "system", and new motherhood plays an important role in the trajectory of a woman's life, and the gender division of labor has since been established. Many obstetricians, psychologists and even philosophers and some childcare consultants think that they know better than women the various changes in women's physical and mental and life when they become mothers, and make various suggestions, but in fact, only women understand the upheavals and anxieties and helplessness they face at the moment of their first motherhood.
The book chronicles the experiences of 66 women who became pregnant, gave birth, and became mothers, and their oral accounts are the main text, and the author Ann Oakley's short commentary only sets the framework for the narrative. These interviewees also had the ecstasy of new motherhood, but this ecstasy was not enough to resist the gap between expectations and reality: Why is equal parenting just an empty phrase in the end? Why didn't motherhood reach our ideal picture?
First published in 1979, the book was another research report by Ann Oakley after The Invisible Woman: The Sociology of Family Affairs, and it attracted a number of media attention, both praise and criticism. Critics argue that the book's depiction of motherhood is too bleak and depressing, but today, more than 40 years later, motherhood has become a more deliberate thing for women. Because what to do in the long years after becoming a mother, not to be kidnapped by the criteria of "qualified mother" defined by society, to find a real balance between motherhood and being yourself, is still difficult to answer.
social science
Afghanistan Document
Author: [U.S.] Craig Whitlock
Translator: Chen Xiaoqian, Zhang Wendou
Edition: CITIC Publishing House
Recommended by: Shen Lu
On August 30, 2021, as the last U.S. ejected aircraft flew over Afghanistan, the nearly two-decade-long war in Afghanistan came to an end in a state of mourning. Twenty years is so long that many people even blur the beginning of this war, just as it is not clear when this resolute and hasty withdrawal began.
There are many angles to answer such a twenty-year-old conundrum, and the regression event itself is one of them. Craig, the author of The Afghanistan Papers, is a washington post reporter with a long history of U.S. military strategy in the Middle East following the U.S. war on terror and the aftermath of 9/11, and his role as a journalist makes him particularly sensitive to the tears between the official narrative and the actual direction of the War in Afghanistan. The book is based on interviews with more than a thousand people who experienced the war at the time, and it is not an attempt to record the course of the war in its entirety, preferring to explain why things came to this point.
It is worth mentioning that the author did not choose to include from the analysis of the incident, but mainly presented details - how the successive US administrations repeatedly adjusted the target demands during the Afghan war, and in the later reconstruction of Afghanistan, the attempt to "replicate the United States" has triggered some ridiculous farces... The intricate lines on these blades eventually extend to a sigh behind the twenty-year quagmire, and as the preface says, the soldiers in Afghanistan who are far away from the ocean can neither tell "whom they are enemies" nor "for whom they are fighting", let alone "when it will end".
What impressed me was the portrayal of ordinary people trapped in the tears between the U.S. government and the Taliban regime. They do not know when this group of outsiders in the name of "assistance" will leave, but they know that they will leave one day, so they often have to "bet" on both sides at the same time in order to survive, and constantly stage "the art of being ruled". And these are reminiscent of the poem of the Afghan-born poet Rumi: "This is your path, the road you go independently, others can accompany you, but no one can walk for you." ”
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