this is an EXCELLENT cookbook filled with all the most popular chinese dishes. from sesame chicken to hot and sour soup, it gives all the tricks on how to make a delicious chinese dinner! if you aren't familiar with lee ann chin, her recipes produce meals similar to PF chang's and other chinese bistros. good luck and happy cooking!

Passion is the generator of war, the essence of life, and the reason for writing this story. Passion was not a sin, but left to run unchecked it lead to the sin of war and slavery. Canaan's Land seems to have all the passion needed to tell a good story of an uncomfortable time that America would soon forget, but shouldn't. This writer did a good job is telling the untold story. She could have used a good editor first for reasons obvious, but other than that, I would strongly recommend this book as a piece of untold history that should be told.

The problem with this book becomes regrettably clear if one also reads Matthew Kennedy's biography of the wonderful Marie Dressler. Lee, despite her obvious effort, is not as assiduous a researcher as one would desire. Films she has not seen in fact exist for viewing; aspects of Dressler's personal life Lee implies are lost to history are in fact recoverable; Lee cannot ascertain what became of Dressler's faithful maid while Kennedy tracks her neatly to the end of her life; etc. Furthermore, Lee makes a welcome attempt to situate Dressler within theatrical history -- which was most of her career -- but appears to have essentially boned up on the subject before writing the book. Bringing turn-of-the-century theatre to life is challenging given that virtually all we have left are photographs, reviews, and sketchy comments, but people immersed in the subject by nature have accomplished this in varous books in a way that Lee cannot quite match. The main value of Lee's book is her access to the diary of Dressler's longtime companion and her thorough coverage of Dressler's battle with cancer. Otherwise, however, Kennedy's book is much more thorough and gives more of a sense of what made Dressler such a phenomenon.