Gordon Angus từ North Belle Vernon, PA, USA

gordonangus

12/22/2024

Dữ liệu người dùng, đánh giá và đề xuất cho sách

Gordon Angus Sách lại (10)

2019-03-06 00:30

Tin Học Căn Bản Dành Cho Học Sinh Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Nguyễn Công Tuấn

This was hilarious! It took me a while to read though, I kept forgetting which countries had which face/clothes. The book reads like a series of short stories. I was surprised to read that personifying countries was a foriegn conceipt to the Japanese audience. If you look at Western art, all sorts of things are represented by other things. But it's even more surprising in regards to Japanese History. When WWII ended, America had issues determining who was to be held "responsible" for their continued, er conquest. Even the emperor answered to a "higher" entity (Japan in and of itself). Maybe what the editors were refering to was the notion that other countries could also have "entities." I chuckled to myself when I read Japan's description of itself. "Unique" and "small" appeared, and I can't say that was unexpected. Japan is as unique as any other country. On a side note, there is a reason why there is so much focus on the Shinto religion (even though very few actually practice it), Mt. Fuji, and Samurai. Japan actually has very few completely original ideas culturally as much of it comes from other places, whether or not that is ever ever admitted. (For those who want to know- Alphabet: Chinese influence Buddhism: Indian -lots practice this- Government: modeled after the English, past Japanese governments, and with an American flare Industrial Model: German Educational Model: German there are lots, but my brain is getting tired.) As for the "small" part, there are over 6,000 islands that belong to Japan. Japan is not small. There are plenty of other countries that are much smaller. Now onto my favorite part, history! The history presented in this was so boiled down that it would be difficult to say that this was completely accurate. You would only be able to catch the inaccuracies if you were not only well versed in the era that was being covered in that scene, but also that country's own history. Needless to say, it was interesting reading a Japanese presceptive on world history. examples! The American Revolution As cool as it would have been for England and America to have a touching scene and end the war with a change of heart, that simply did not happen. America won because other countries found it to be an opportune time to attack other parts of English territory for their own gain. Spain had a hard time focuses on anything but attacking the Straight of Gibraltar and taking away control of the area away from England. England gave up to divert forces to protect more valuable rescources. But an interesting nuance that was "accurate" was the clothing. America played up the "simple folk" look to other nations to feed into an image that Americans were hard working and straightforward. I guess you could thank Ben Franklin for perpetuating that myth to European audiences as he would not dress up to go to political meetings or parties. (It should also be noted that he did spend a lot of time partying, and not always alone.) The Holy Roman Empire This topic was presented in an unusual way when you consider other empires were not mentioned in this volume. Also, part of the time it was represented as a person, the other part, it was represented as a house. The Ottoman Empire would have been interesting seeing as both empires not only existed at the same time, but border each other. Oh, and the name did not come about because part of the Roman Empire desired a name change. The Roman Empire had an extremely long collapse, seeing as it split as it collapsed and part of it lasted longer than the other part. Also, the Roman Empire did not unite all of it's territories into one big massive country, nor did it unify Italy in the same sense it is today. Rome itself was basically always just the city. To be a true Roman, you had to be born in the city, not just in a Roman territory. When Rome conquered a place, it basically drew up a contract saying that Rome controls it, it pays taxes to Rome and is subject to Rome's laws, it does not get to participate in creating those laws, and Rome will protect it. Basically. Each place had a different agreement, so what I just said isn't 100% true, but it's generalized just fine. haha Japanese Industry Japan wasn't actually known for it's quality in WWII. It industrialized very quickly following the German model (which was also building very quickly, as it had a lot to recover from). So, the statement about mass producing things smaller, and also building robots is a nod to the present. You might be wondering who was the industrial leader, the English. America was close behind, but let's face it, was going slow and seems to have qualms when it comes to change. Other countries industrialized at an alarming rate such as Russia, Germany, and Japan. I could talk about others, but this is why it took me a couple of days to finish this thing. I would read a cell or two, then talk it over with myself in my head, discussing the history I remembered, chuckled at the reference, and debated just how accurate it was. I wish I knew my world history better, I mean, it's been over 4 years since I've had a class that covered something outside of America. But this book was seriously fun and I look forward to reading book 2. It's so refreshing seeing someone present history as something fun and palatable to the masses.

2019-03-06 01:30

Trở Về Năm 1981 Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Tú Cẩm

Reread the novel few days ago and wrote the following: Criticism of didacticism is common fare when talking of works of literature. Poems or novels must not express political views. They must shy away from social commentary. Ideologies must not be hammered on the heads of the readers. Yet this general rule seems not to be the case with Ilustrado, an intensely political debut novel by Miguel Syjuco, a Filipino writer living in Canada. Instead of encountering the usual admonitions on the necessity of maintaining literature as a neutral field that transcends class and time, Ilustrado earns Syjuco accolades from the literary establishment. The novel received praises from the leading papers in the West and won the author the 2008 Man Asian and Palanca Awards. Typical postmodern Ilustrado begins with Crispin Salvador, renowned writer and iconoclast, found floating in Hudson River. In typical postmodern fashion, the death of an author – who at the same time serves as a father-figure – marks the beginning of the novel. Then we have Miguel Syjuco as his novel’s own main protagonist, whose investigation of Salvador’s death propels the novel forward. Syjuco is supposedly writing a biography of Salvador, the Eight Lives Lives and much of Ilustrado revolves around interrogating the narrator’s relation with the dead writer. The novel takes the form of a seemingly endless bricolage of narratives, interviews, excerpts from fictional texts, emails, text jokes, blog entries, among others. It is a convoluted mess of a story, a bloated collage that seeks to represent in broad strokes the general sweep of Philippine history and society. The medium is the message seems to be Syjuco’s mantra and this structure stands in for what the author perceives to be the inescapable fragmentation of Filipino society and identity. This also hints affinity to the cliché of how all grand narratives have lost their efficacy in the contemporary era. At the time of his death, Salvador was working on a magnum opus The Bridges Ablaze that purportedly exposes all the rottenness and shenanigans of the domestic ruling classes, the class from which Salvador, like Syjuco himself, hailed. The limits of class and distance It thus comes as logical for Ilustrado to be promoted as heir to Rizal’s scathing novels against Spanish colonial rule, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. Syjuco himself presents the novel in various occasions as a critique of contemporary Philippine society and history. Accordingly, the International Herald Tribune not only endorses Ilustrado but also eulogizes the circumstances of its literary production: “a novel that he could only have written from the distance, physical and emotional, provided by life in exile.” Yet the limitation here is in its comprehension of society from a narrow perspective that is widely divorced from the experience of the vast majority Filipinos languishing in hunger and poverty. The problem is in the way the novel frames the experience of a particular class – namely the educated elites – to stand in for that of the whole country itself. The focus on the corruption and crimes of the ruling classes cannot in any way be a comprehensive view of Philippine realities. At the same time, whatever moral indignation committed by this class is not situated in terms of historical and material causes. Instead, we are left with entertaining but tired satires of ruling class hedonism and an overwhelming barrage of tasteless caricatures that poke fun at the masses. The Filipino people are described here as the perpetual tools of the ruling classes who manipulate them as pawns in their factional rivalries. Ordinary Filipinos are completely drowned in the imbecility of the mass media industry and the circuits of social media networks. They are duped by Filipino leaders such as Dingdong Changco Jr, Nuredin Bansamoro, and Reverend Martin who are thinly-veiled stand-ins for real-life political figures. The subaltern, in short, cannot speak. What Syjuco leaves out here are those daily sorrows and joys, those instances of human solidarity and sacrifices by ordinary Filipinos in order to survive, eke out a living, preserve dignity, and endure an oppressive and exploitative social order. The communist bogey The weakness of Ilustrado is nowhere more visible than in its depiction of the communist-led armed revolutionary movement in the Philippines. It is here, as literary critic Edel Garcellano notes, that the limits of its privileging of distance and class standpoint is most apparent: 1. Are the NPA cadres trained from purely military purposes? Is this not reminiscent of Rambo movies and Kung Fu action films? Is this not recreating jungle warfare training for American marines by indigenous tribes? 2. Are Kalashnikov rifles locally produced? Does it not remind the reader of Taliban insurgents in their CNN visual landscape? 3. Does the Sparrow Unit operate as a separate command and in the countryside yet? 4. Is the transaction done by the soldiers themselves, or through civilian conduits? Do Red fighters get to drink with the military, like some bandit-guerillas in a Hollywood setting? 5. In the heat of battle, is the blame game already in play? Shouldn’t there be an investigation? 6. Is the Party alienated from its mass base? The answer to these questions are both simple and complicated and yet these nuances are never even hinted at in the novel: First, Filipino revolutionaries following Mao Zedong have for most of the time emphasized the political objectives of their protracted people’s war. This focus shifted for a while in the 1980s when spells of military adventurism afflicted the underground. Secondly, most of the arsenal if the revolutionary combatants are taken from government forces in daring raids, ambuscades, and agaw-armas operations. The third, fourth, and fifth concerns are pure products of Syjuco’s corporate media-inspired image of the underground rather than a realistic approximation of realities on the ground. Lastly, the revolutionaries were for the most part firmly immersed with their mass bases, a feat that allowed them to become security threats to the ruling order for more than four decades but this element is sadly missing in Ilustrado. One doesn’t have to agree with the politics of the underground Left in order to make, at the very least, an objective account of their struggles. After all, for all its flaws and weaknesses, this was the movement that served as the core to the anti-dictatorship struggles against the Marcos regime in the 1970s and 80s. But it would seem that Syjuco’s deceptive portrayal fits squarely with his own view of the movement as a mere phase of youthful rebellion that is eventually outgrown. The Ilustrado narrative Ilustrado presents the reader with choices. Like in a busy market, you can take your pick of a densely layered plethora of texts. Rather than serving as building blocks for a comprehensive view of the social totality, any such construction is shattered by the novel into an endless proliferation of texts and images that obscures the realities of class contradictions. Here there is no more truth that can illuminate social reality, no anchor that gives meaning. All that is left is the chaotic play of signs over an endless surface. And yet the seeming diversity remains dominated by the voice of a single class. It is the privileging of the vantage point of the educated ilustrados, a fragmented view from the apex of privilege, as the only narrative. The real lesson here is, of course, that admonitions made against didacticism in works of art and literature is often applicable only to those that challenge the prevailing order. For all the posturing as a work critical of the status quo in the tradition of Filipino national hero Jose Rizal’s anti-colonial and anti-clerical classics, Ilustrado has a fundamentally conservative core. How then must we deal with books like this? In La Chinoise, French director Jean Luc Godard’s film about student radicalism in the 1960s, we find the following dialogue: Should books be burned? No, they shouldn’t. We could not criticize them then. http://karlomongaya.wordpress.com/201...

2019-03-06 02:30

Những Câu Chuyện Ở Xứ Thần Tiên - Những Cuộc Phiêu Lưu Của Peter Pan Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Catmint Books

Another novella with masterful mix of past and future lives and events. Once again with are left hanging, but this time with the certain knowledge that the sequel is not do out till October.

2019-03-06 03:30

50 Sắc Thái - Tập 3: Tự Do Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: E. L. James

great series. must read!

2019-03-06 04:30

Longman New Real Toeic - Actual Tests For Reading Comprehension RC - Tái bản 11/12/2012 Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Nhiều Tác Giả

There is nothing I can honestly say right now to sum up my feelings. Its really sad when Sebastian (Jonathan) died *sobs* I know he's the villain but I cant help loving him even hes evil. Hes like that not by his choice. The image of him as a perfect brother is heart-wrecking beautiful. But the good news is Simon is finally a part of Shadowhunter. Yay!! *squee* and... it a happy ending for Jace and Clary, Alec and Magnus, also Izzy and Simon. They deserve a happy ending even theres still demons outside and a prob left with the fae... Let just wait for Emma and Julian's story ... a forbidden love between parabatai I hope.. hahahaha

2019-03-06 05:30

Văn Hóa Tộc Người Nùng Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi:

This is a great presentation of the options before us, but Pollan has a definite bias and it gets a little weird in the end, I thought. I work with food producers and this book doesn't present the whole, mightily complex, picture of the US industry.

2019-03-06 06:30

Một Dãy Bạn Vui Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Kerstin Schoene

I'm not sure exactly how to review this book. It was really good and compelling and sucks you in and kinda wierd with a touch of romance. So yep, It's worth the read, but like I said... kinda weird too.

2019-03-06 07:30

Cẩm Nang Dành Cho Tuổi Teen - Giải Quyết Các Vấn Đề Trong Trường Học Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Penny Warm

Although the premise of the story had promise, I was bored out of my mind. The "love" story between Lune and Deven was not really fleshed out at all. Not very exciting.

2019-03-06 08:30

Những Thành Phố Vô Hình Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Italo Calvino

LOVE HP! This series gets better with each book.

2019-03-06 09:30

Những Bài Văn Hay Tiểu Học 3 Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Hồ Thị Vân Anh

Imaginative, well-written speculative fiction. Lots of cool what-ifs: if the Tower of Babel hadn't been destroyed (which the author describes in a note as Babylonian science fiction), hyperintelligence, a documentary-style story and more. The title story made me cry, and I keep thinking about it a week later. And I loved that there were notes at the end of the book where the author talked a little about each story -- all short story books should have that. Also, awesomely, this is a whole scifi book that ISN'T offensive toward women.

Người đọc Gordon Angus từ North Belle Vernon, PA, USA

Người dùng coi những cuốn sách này là thú vị nhất trong năm 2017-2018, ban biên tập của cổng thông tin "Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn" khuyến cáo rằng tất cả các độc giả sẽ làm quen với văn học này.