Product Description
The emergence of Taoism during the 3rd through 8th centuries as China's indigenous higher religion affected all areas of culture. This volume, one of a pair by Paul Kroll (its companion dealing with other aspects of medieval Chinese literature and cultural history), brings together twelve studies by this leading scholar of medieval China which illuminate selected aspects of Taoism in texts dating to this period and also considers its influence in the works of the great T'ang-dynasty poet, Li Po. Included here are essays on the proto-Taoist poem "Far Roaming" from the 2nd century B.C., on gods, goddesses, paradises, and poetry of the momentous Shang-ch'ing revelations of the 4th century A.D., and on Taoist figures from the T'ang dynasty. The author's writings on Li Po are well known, and several articles included in the second half of the book examine Li Po's personal connection with religious Taoism and his use of its specialized imagery. The volume concludes with a study focusing on the influence of earlier writings on Li Po's famous poem "The Road to Shu is Hard", and with an extensive monograph on his use of Buddhism in his poems and inscriptions. ... Read more

Product Description
History and legend brilliantly combine in this bawdy "autobiographical" account of the life of famed rabble-rousing versemaker Li Po. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

Brought tears
truly a cathartic book,highly recommend it to anyone looking for a novel to read period.

Fun to Read and Entertaining
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Reviewed by Randy Farnsworth, author of "A Stand Yet Taken".

As a longtime student of Chinese history, I was intrigued when I came across this book. Chinese history, particularly ancient China, has always fascinated me, and this novel didn't let me down. However, it started out a bit slow, and after 20 pages or so, I almost put it aside for something more interesting. The topic may not appear too exciting at first - the life story of a poet in eighth-century China - and it does have a slow start, but A Floating Life is actually a fun book and quite exciting at times.

Li Po is a real person, and has had a great influence even to this day. When my Chinese-born wife saw what I was reading, she immediately quoted some of Li Po's poetry and told me how he was always drunk. Simon Elegant takes some liberties with the story, but this is a novel after all, not a history book, so don't expect everything to be totally accurate.

The writing style is interesting: Simon Elegant uses present tense, third-person omniscience for the "present" time of the story, where Li Po is interacting with a young student who has agreed to write down the poet's story in return for instruction in the classic arts. Elegant then switches to past tense, first person limited viewpoint as Li Po relates his adventures. The reader is taken back and forth between the present and past and in a few places it's somewhat awkward, causing me to stop and figure out where in the timeline I was. But most of the transitions are smooth, and the present story fits in well with the past, especially as the two stories meet in the end.

As Elegant tries to convey a sense of setting and background, he describes with elegant (sorry :-) ) details the life, customs and culture of the time he is writing about. At first I thought he was really going overboard, just trying to show off his knowledge of the era with all the minute facts he could include, whether or not they added to the story. But the problem with my complaint is, they really do add to the story and hurl the reader back in time to Imperial China.

The book isn't perfect, though, as no book is, and if you're not into historical novels in general and Chinese history in particular, you may not find this too interesting. For example, Elegant spends a whole page or more just describing what the emperor served for dinner. I enjoyed reading that; it reminded me of some fancy banquets I attended while living in Asia. But some readers would just scan through that in an effort to get to the real story.

Also, I still don't see the need for any author to offend the reader with vulgar language. We all know that some people talk like that in real life, but we don't need to read it. It really adds absolutely nothing to the book and in reality, detracts from it. That said, however, I appreciate the fact that Elegant doesn't dwell too long on sex and violence. He lets us know that the world of Li Po was a violent place and briefly mentions some of the brutality, but doesn't disgust the reader with a play-by-play. Ditto on the sex scenes.

Lastly, I don't know if Elegant has downloaded a dictionary into his brain or what, but he sure uses some obscure language in places. I didn't mind that, but I had to keep a dictionary handy to look up some of the words.

Sublime melancholy, like a good bowl of Huangjiu
Anything written from the Zhuangzi/Daoist point of view, from Lin Yutang's 'Moment in Peking' on down the sadly short list, shows an entirely different portrait of China than we are used to seeing. Amid the conformity, an eccentric; amid the tradition, a progressive; amid the acquiescence, a rebel; amid the herd, an individual. The tide never has, and probably never will, turn, but it is nice to know that there will always be those willing to swim joyously against it.

Li Po, or Li Bai as he is called in standard Mandarin, is one of those rare such characters in Chinese history, and Simon Elegant brings him convincingly to life, a man of flesh and blood and spirit.

I know little of Li Bai; here in China he is much memorialized but less remembered, so the tales in "Floating Life" are as much as I know about the mythology beyond the repute of the poems. I'm sure Elegant did his research, though, and it makes for an engaging tale.

The device of the acolyte/narrator is awkward at times, and the breaks away from Li Bai's voice cause the book's progression to stumble, but it does allow the tale to be told in first person and without overly rigorous chronology. Li Bai's tales, told through his perspective, witty and insightful, are what make the book.

And the book does justice to Li Bai's poetry and ethic. Reading it, one gets lost in the quiet moment, as if downing a bowl of warm Huangjiu in a boat on the West Lake at dusk. Simple, sublime. Li Bai did many things, and is enshrined in the catacombs of history, but what matters is that he knew how to be happy, how to live in the moment.

Poetry with Perspective
Simon Elegant's telling of the itinerant poet, Li Po's life, is a wonderfully told story. The larger than life Byronic overtones of Li Po's adventures serve to highlight the poetry which is liberally interspersed with his life's tale. The poetry, as a result, takes on a relevance missing in strict anthologies. While it is true that the story lacks some character development, this is not a book intended to be the last word on Li Po's life. However,"A Floating Life" is a terrific place to start one's own journey into the world of chinese poetry and literature.

Enjoyable, but not really memorable
Elegant stays fairly close to the historical facts, such facts as can be distinguished from the many legends, in telling the life of the great poet and Taoist Li Po. Li tells the story in this novel to a young boy, Wang Lung. The story is fun, and is the same sort of mixture of truth and myth that Li himself probably would have used had he really written an autobiography. There are numerous intriguing and believable details about the daily lives of people at various social levels, from the Imperial Court to poverty, in T'ang China.

The main weakenss in the book for me was that only Li Po really emerges as a character. The others who show up, either in the story of Li recounting his life while going into exile or in the story of Li's life, are poorly developed. Elegant works several poems by Li into the text, but I would have liked to see more.

It is worth noting that I have seen several translations of many of the poems here.I can't comment on the accuracy of Elegant's versions, but they are generally delightful, more enjoyable than other translations into English of the same poem.

I recommend it on the whole, for the charm of the story and of the poems translated in it, but I can't do so with great enthusiasm. A better novel with some similar material is 'Bridge of Birds' by Hughart. ... Read more

Product Description
A fresh bilingual collection of more than 100 poems from China selected and translated for their Zen spirit. Drawn from twenty centuries of writing, the book includes poems by such favorits as Han Shan, Shih Te, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Pai Chu I; Chaio Jan, Yin Luan, Su Shih, Chin Kung, Chun An, and many others. Here are poems as songs from the heart of being.Now in its second printing. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

an excellent collection well translated
This book is a well-chosen cross-section of Chinese Zen poetry. It also supplies one of my favorite items in translations of foreign poetry - the original text.The strength of this book is the broad stretch of time covered, as indicated by the organization of the index: pre-T'ang dynasty, T'ang, Sun, Yuan, Ming, Ch'ing.This breadth also means, however, that not all the poetry is of the quality one find's in more focused collections ephasizing the masters Wang Wei, Han Shan, Li Po... Several of these collections appear as "selected sources" in this book.

My favorite in this volume is The Flow and Seed Sequence, a series seven poems written by the Zen Patriarchs beginning with Bodhidharma (d. 536) with poems added to the series nearly 2 centuries later.The translations do an excellent job of retaining the concrete imagery typical of Zen poetry e.g. from Liu Chang Ching "All along the trail of moss, / I follower your wooden shoeprints". We find inventive descriptions of concret images in Liu Fang-Ping "The Big Dipper slopes; / the Great Bear bends down".There are also unusual mentions of doubt from Wang An Shih "Often I doubt the Buddhist way, / that nothing truly exists".

Despite its many good attributes, this collection failed my ultimate test: rarely was I enticed to read and reread a poem.I would still recommend A Drifting Boat or Cold Mountain first.But to even be worthy of comparison to those volumes is strong praise. ... Read more

Product Description
University of Nottingham, U.K. An alphabetical, evidence-based quick reference of common ailments and the British over-the-counter drugs available to treat them. For practitioners and lay-persons. Softcover. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Dated material
This book has some useful general information on Kuang Ping Tai Chi and Tai Chi in general, but contains references outside of the realm of Tai Chi that suggest a new-age blend of thought and practice. One very odd aspect of this book is that the male players all sport the long hair and unkempt beards of the Hippie Era, but the book was written long after that period ended. It makes the photos hard to take seriously today. One should be forgiving with this book, however, as it is very dated. It is one of the only sources (not the best, as someone pointed out here) of written information on this style of Tai Chi. A good teacher will serve one much better for learning Kuang Ping (also called Guang Ping). If you only have a casual interest in the subject, this might be a starting place, but most of this information is available online at different Guang Ping/Kuang Ping Tai Chi websites.

Guang Ping Yang Tai chi Chuan
The only good book on the subject of Guang Ping Yang is Guttmann's translation of Kuo, Lien Ying's 'The T'ai Chi Boxing Chronicle' and that book is not for beginners. The poster who recommends Yoga and comments rather ignorantly about Guang Ping suffers from a standard misconception about the art. Although it is a gentle healing art, the healing comes as a result of good steady practice and is a result of the internal balancing that occurs from proper use of energy. This is a demanding study. Tai Chi Chuan is an internal energy boxing art much aligned with Bagua and Shing-yi. It is one of the more difficult of the Tai Chi arts to learn because of it's need for years of training and practice. In it's higher good it is nothing less than alchemy or transformation of the individual from lead to gold.

This is a NON-MARTIAL Tai chi book. Try Yoga instead...
This book would provide the reader with an exercise system that would,indeed, improve balance and health. This system is based on Tai Chi, but isnot Tai Chi. If you're looking for a dance routine no one else knows, thisbooks for you. As far as excercise goes, it would do OK, but because it'snot actual Tai Chi, most of the aspects which bring about health aremissing. I would strongly recommend Yoga for health if you don't want tolearn a martial art. I also feel that to use this book without a solid basein either martial arts or Yoga, one would be risking injury unless ateacher were present (and then you wouldn't need a book :). So, if you'relooking for a good book on Tai Chi, look elsewhere. ... Read more

Product Description
Chou Li-po was born in a village in Iyang County, Hunan Province, in 1908. His father was a village school teacher, and his two elder brothers are both middle peasants. After finishing junior secondary school in 1927, Chou Li-po was compelled by poverty to leave school, and went to Shanghai. In 1929, he passed the entrance examination at the free University for Workers. Eight months later, however, he was expelled by the reactionary university authorities for his leftist ideology and revolutionary activities. In the winter of 1931, on the recommendation of a schoolmate, he got a job as a proof-reader in a printing-house in Shanghai. In 1932, he was arrested by the Kuomintang reactionaries for taking part in a strike at the press and was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Released in 1934, he joined the China Federation of Left-Wing Writers and was admitted to the Communist Party of China. Since then, he has held a number of posts, serving as editor of magazines and newspapers, war correspondent, translator from English, teacher at Lu Hsun Arts' Institute in Yenan and head of the Editing and Translation Department of the same institute. Other works by Chou Li-po include My Impressions of the Shansi-Chahar-Hopei Border Region, Diary at the Front, and In the Soviet Union. The Hurricane, written after he had participated in the land reform in the Northeast in 1946, won a Stalin Prize for Literature in 1951. Chou Li-po also helped to write the scenario of the film Liberated China, which won a Stalin Prize in 1950. In addition to writing, he has translated many literary classics, including Pushkin's Dubrovsky and Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned. ... Read more

Product Description
This useful book provides a ready reference of common ailments, arranged alphabetically, and the OTC (over-the-counter) medications that can be used to treat them. Everything has been set out for ease of reference and quick use. ... Read more

Product Description
A dictionary of commonly used terms in evidence-based medicine. It contains definitions, explanatory notes and references. This text is suitable for both pharmacist and doctors not familiar with statistical terms, and statisticians not familiar with pharmaceutical or clinical terminology. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

More exciting to read as mother language!!
Of course, JKR's first book was the most eye-widening book among the 5 books (up till now) and it's more exciting to read in mother language as it takes time for a chinese to read an english book. (I guess there's no need for me to explain the greatness of the Rowling books) So lets go back to the translation. It's nice (but not great) as this edition is translated by Taiwanese which use lots of slang language which other Chinese-speaking people do not understand. So, personally, I would suggest the Simplied Chinese editon for nicer translation. ... Read more

Product Description
Univ. of Nottingham, U.K. Textbook for pharmacy students and professionals. Includes coverage of parametric and non-parametric tests. Each chapter includes a flow chart to help in test selection. Modified-outline format. Softcover. ... Read more