Prince Jen travels to a mythical kingdom with 6 gifts that he loses along the way to the people he meets on his journey. The lives he touches has a karmic effect and his gifts he 'loses' comes back to him in the end many times over.
I devoured each word, eagerly looking forward to finding out what happened next. Although it's geared toward the young adult age, this 30-something found it quite entertaining,and full of insights. Each time I read the book I get something else back.
I personally believe that Prince Jen is a book everyone should read and would be great for classroom work by all ages and set up easily for discussion into many areas such as relationship structures, mythic journeys, classic children's fiction, and of course Chinese or Asian History.. This story was based (although a fantasy) on Chinese Myths...
Bottom line: Lloyd Alexander is an amazing virtuoso of storytelling and The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen is another proof of that..
The main character, Young Lord Prince Jen Shao Yeh, is very honest and is willing to help anyone. He does not act as a prince while outside the palace. Instead, he wears a yellow robe and a yellow hat. This book takes place in back in 7th century China, during the T'ang Dynasty. The celestial palace is in the capital, Chang'an where Jen Shao Yeh comes from.
In the beginning, when Jen departs from the celestial palace on a great journey, he brings his servant and army with him. He rides a carriage along the way, carrying a sack of gifts, heading to the kingdom of Tien'Kuo. On his journey, he meets many people, including a painter named Chen Cho, Natha Yellow Scarf, and Master Chu. He parts with some of his group and some of the gifts but finds them back. Jen is informed by his servant that his father, the king, died when they were on the journey and that he was now king of T'ang. He is immediately sent back to the palace. When he does, he finds that an enemy has already taken over the palace. Will Jen be able to recapture his kingdom and rule with his beloved lady?
I would recommend this novel because Lloyd Alexander has used very descriptive words and I can picture what is going on. I would give this book a 5 star rating because it is just one of my favorite books that I have read in my whole entire life! This book is confusing the first time you read it though not the second time. I would especially recommend this book to children in fourth grade and up because the vocabulary skills necessary are quite demanding. This book sure will be a joy to read.
List price: $45.00 (that's 30% off!)
Unlike many coffee table books, this one is chock-full of substantive information. There are separate and informative chapters on the wines of a host of countries -- France, Spain, the U.S., Australia, Argentina, and many others. The information is well organized and would easily serve as an excellent reference source for each. "Wine: From Grape to Glass" meets the challenge that so many other wine books fail: not too general, not too detailed. For each wine region, there is a history of the wine making in that region, along with enough information about each type of wine from the region to give the reader a firm handle on the wines without bombarding the reader with a list of specific labels and vintages.
Without question, though, the absolute best thing about this book is the extensive coverage of winegrowing, grape varieties, and the craft of winemaking. To his great credit, author Jens Priewe seamlessly integrates some pretty complicated information without cutting corners. Everything about the grape-to-wine process is here: choosing, planting, tending, harvesting, fermenting, and aging.
If you have ever taken "the tour" at any winery and have found yourself wishing you could hear more about the winemaking process - this is the book for you. Priewe includes so much excellent information, that you could probably buy your own vine and make your own wine using this book as your only reference. It's that good.
Skip Baker skipb@widomaker.com
work is just soooo busy, and with this book you get a cd containing 21 components (actually, there's even more than that if you count some of the neat experimental ones!). I'm not even gonna try and work out how much development time this cd will save me, but I can't advise it enough - i really hope these guys bring more of them out. To be honest i've only looked through about half of these components so far, but i'm still blown away -
check out tool tip, the dynamic text 'stringthing', and the XML/actionscript converter especially - i didn't even realize i needed these things until now! The chapter on the movie loader is just a killer too. And there are also more 'crazy-stoopid' ones, like pattern generators and image modulators. What can i say, buy it and hope these authors bring out a sequel! Tons of fully-documented components, tons of examples, i'm a happy
designer!
It would also make a great film!
Amanda
Katie's voice is so real and her thoughts so explained that I would become totally lost in the story and come out it a while later to realize that I really wasn't in her world.
Elizabeth Berg's Joy School is the sequel to Durable Goods, and I read that one first. However, Durable Goods was still a great book and I recommend it even for those who have already read Joy School. Pick up Durable Goods and join Katie in her fresh, exciting world.
I thought the author created a very likeable character in Katie. The first half of the book builds the character and introduces her relationships with her father, who is abusive; her sister-who is kind to her sometimes and mean other times; and her best friend CherylAnne-who is two years older and is very wise and womanly for her age.
atie is a strong person for being so young, and that is what makes her so likeable. Dealing with the death of her mother and her father's abusive actions show how strong she really is. Whereas Dianne tries to escape from her problems by running away to Mexico with her boyfriend, Katie confronts them.
Since the book was written from Katie's point of view, I got a more personal perspective. Of Elizabeth Berg's books, this is the first one that I have read. I think it was an excellent book. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading short yet intriguing books.
grip to the very end. It was JAWS meets IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE.
On the first page she dedicates this book to her "excellent mom"
and then spends the next 30 pages dissing her... I am in love!!!
It's a splendid trot through the hot spots that pepper this
glorious globe of ours! An incandifferous attempt at turning
chicken caca into chicken salad! ...P>I LOVED this book. I can't wait for the next one.
I haven't laughed this hard since "Lust in the Dust"
"Don't sleep with your drummer" is spectacular... a hilarious
look at the music industry, secret love, overbearing parents,
and the staggering throb of best friends....
Santa Claus is coming to town....
Rosenfeld's cross-country year with Justine includes an unforgettable conjoin with six-year-old sister Rona and a middle-of-the-vortex experience with the girls' mother Colleen, who drags her offspring from one city to the next in search of adventure and the next new love.
Thrust into an earlier-than-necessary role as caretaker, Justine attempts to work through her insubordinate angst by journeling everything she sees and feels.
Rosenfeld's tale glimmers with an appreciative passion for life's subtle and ordinary moments, a funny, poignant nod to the inherent treachery of adolescence and the amazing resilience of the human will to victor over every single hurdle along the path to the race's reward at destination's end.
List price: $35.00 (that's 30% off!)
Bonami does not seek its true closure, of course. He looks instead to reveal what lies beneath "art". While he is a critic and curator, Bonami makes his money and travels the world through buying for rich collectors; so too in the grander scheme, just as art finds its truest manifestation these days in publically funded festivals or Bienales it is still the collectors' money that talks in the end.
Bonami is clearly uncomfortable with the paradoxes of his chosen career. He has written previously in the magazine, Flash Art, that there is something rotten, dead, about institutional art, yet he himself works within this space (his next project, which he has researched extensively, is a study of sexuality and travel that will show at the Walker in the year 2000.
Bonami's is a simple thesis: in a sense he - and art - wants it all. There is not pleasure in discovering a new artist in Soweto, if it is not balanced by deluxe hotels in Venice or Berlin; there is not pleasure in familial life if there is not excitements outside it. There is not pleasure in the profundity of art, in the end, unless there is an Other, a Shock of the Superficial.
In many senses, Echoes is the project and product of middle-aged exile; like a character in Nabokov, Bonami spreads his waning European potency ever more thinly when confronted with the virility of the global art market - its cheque-books and hotel bills; its cool rhetoric and lofty ideals. This is manifest in Echoes where he allows many artists to put their point, creating a melange of ideas, rather than attempting anything close to an Idea. There is no such idea as an Idea, he seems to say, only pleasure.
Bonami's vision of the art world perhaps reflects a reflexive self-questioning, and doubt. A questioning that we should all undertake at least once in our lives. But no more than once.
Also the essay by Seward is pretty good. What he writes about Martin Heidegger is ignorant (obviously he hasn't read Being & Time), but the section titled "Analytic of the Shocking" is a must-read. The essay has a good title, too: "Atomic Bicycle." Apparently Seward is the only author in the book with a sense of humor.
Overall, I would counsel not to buy the book, but to get a copy from the library, xerox two pages of Seward's essay, and maybe scan your favorite pictures to keep on your hard drive. (Like those by that Lamsweerde woman.)
"I think of the post-modern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution.
He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, 'I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same.
These are the same post-modern paradoxes which the globe-trotting Bonami attempts to reconcile in a fascinating parody of - as it were - Flash Art. Like Foucault ("Do you know why one writes?... To be loved.") Bonami illustrates the subtle otherness of creation, through collaborations with an international band of artists - and curators - to ask the same question as Foucault: What's going on just now? What's happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living? (Foucault 1982a p.216)
All in all an extraordinary house of cards, the author balances like Harry Lime on the Ferris wheel in Carol Reed's much loved peaen to the free market, The Third Man.
Bonami/The Third Man explore the very biggest questions of modern art and culture, paralleling the restless rhythmical nature of the author with the endless conclusions and closures of conceptual art. As Foucault said: "How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action? How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the established order?"
Exaclty.
The main character is Jen, the young lord prince, he is persistent, sometimes brave, and generous and he likes Voyaging Moon who is valiant flute girl.This story took place in the Kingdom of Tang and it happened long time ago. Jen, the young lord prince, is traveling to Tien-Kuo to learn more about the kingdom. The prince went searching day and night for Voyaging Moon but he failed at finding her, instead, it got him troubles. He was locked and kept in the dark, creepy jail and was forced by Fat Choy to wear a cangue! Jen gave away his 6 gifts to a traveler that past by that needs presents for another purpose. Finally Jen's 6 valuable gifts (a pointy, sharp sword, a light, smooth saddle, a paint box, a well decorated bronze bowl, a wide, big, beautiful kite, and a wooden flute) for Yuan-Ming (the king of Tien-Kuo) were all given away. He was going empty handed to Tien-Kuo.However, something sad and unbelievable just stopped him to go. It made him return to Chang'an (his palace). From this, I learned that you must never give up doing something except when only some other important thing has to be assigned before that. Moreover, you must know nothing before you can learn something, and be empty before you can be filled. I will recommend this book because it has many descriptive sentences like: The reek of old battlefields choked his nostrils. Cries of the wounded and dying filled his ears. Some can grab your attention like: Robbed and terrorized by bandits, they are worse off than ever. What can they possibly do? To find out, read the next chapter. For me this book makes me nervous because at the end of every chapter, it stops at an exciting or interesting and unbelievable spot. It makes you want to read the next chapter. In addition, I hope that you will enjoy reading it as much as I do! To find out what is making Prince Jen going back to Chang'an read this book!