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5 Awesome Books You Can Buy in Shanghai

2018-04-17 Ryan ShanghaiWOWeng

Book lovers aren’t exactly spoiled here, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t great options around. We swung by Garden Books on Changle Lu for our latest edition of five must-read books that are available in Shanghai, and here’s what caught our eye.


Purity



By: Jonathan Franzen

@ Garden Books: RMB 160


At 23, Pip is trying to pay off her enormous student loan by working at a glorified call center job. She's so poor that she stays with other squatters in a dilapidated house in Oakland, CA - so maybe Pip can be forgiven for coming across a tiny bit hostile. Unfortunately, she has developed the qualities of an emotional leech, constantly seeking approval from father figures in a pathetic attempt to fill the void left by her own unidentified father. 


Then two Germans show up at her house, and Pip becomes part of a decades-old tangle of stories that link her mother to her father and to the enigmatic Andreas Wolf, an East German expat with a terrifying interior life. The individual tales are epic, nonlinear chronicles that brush up against one another, leaving tantalizing traces of what remains untold. Pip's mother is a mysterious personality despite her overbearing possessiveness. And Wolf has an obsession with a journalist named Tom Aberant. All of these people are vitally connected to Pip, whose youthful mix of intelligence, cynicism, and desperate yearning will hook teens. 


Readers with an interest in history, politics, and the implications of social media will enjoy the characters' intellectual discourse. Recommend this extraordinary novel to teens ready for a complex yet engaging read that delivers international events and trends with the same insight as the best nonfiction but is peopled with figures who will be impossible to forget. Verdict: An exceptional introduction to fine literature for mature teen readers. —Diane Colson, Nashville Public Library, TN

 

The Man Who Loved China



By: Simon Winchester

@ Garden Books: RMB 170


In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman, brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needhamâ, the brilliant Cambridge scientist, freethinking intellectual, and practicing nudist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, once the world's most technologically advanced country. – Amazon

 

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better



By: Clive Thompson

@ Garden Books: RMB 170


In this excursion into techno-optimism, Thompson discusses computerized, interconnected social activity. Relying on journalism’s staple of the human-interest story, he describes individuals’ experiences of exploring the Internet in pursuit of their interests. In Thompson’s examples, those pursuits range from retrieving a personal memory to critiquing TV shows to finding a house for sale to researching proteins to organizing political movements. The commonalities Thompson finds among all those searches are prodigious data storage-and-retrieval capacities and the latent presence in cyberspace of someone interested in what you’re interested in. 


Connecting interest with information animates Thompson’s many anecdotes, whose motif of the delight felt by strangers or long-lost friends upon discovering a mutual concern propels his belief that Twitter, Facebook, and social-media sites built by amateurs positively motivate people to think and write better. To criticisms that social media degrade or isolate people, Thompson ripostes with studies or classroom examples that show improvements in learning and the creation of collaborative groups. A lively presenter with a sunny outlook, Thompson will engage readers drawn to the sociology of technology. --Gilbert Taylor

 

Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School and the Global Race to Achieve



By: Lenora Chu

@ Garden Books: RMB 225


When American journalist Lenora Chu moved to Shanghai with her little boy, Rainey, just down the street from the state-run school—the best, as far as elite Chinese were concerned—she faced an important decision: Should she entrust her rambunctious young son to the Chinese public schools?

 

It seemed like a good idea at the time, and so began Rainey’s immersion in one of the most radical school systems on the planet. Almost immediately, the three-year-old began to develop surprising powers of concentration and became proficient in early math. Yet Chu also noticed disturbing new behaviors: Whereas he used to scribble and explore, Rainey was now obsessed with staying inside the lines. He became fearful of authority figures. “If you want me to do it, I’ll do it,” he told a stranger who had asked whether he liked to sing.

 

Driven by parental concern, Chu embarked on an investigative mission: What price do the Chinese pay to produce their “smart” kids, and what lessons might Western parents and educators learn from this system?

 

In her search for answers, Chu followed Chinese students, teachers, and experts, pulling back the curtain on a military-style education system in which even the youngest kids submit to high-stakes tests and parents are crippled by the pressure to compete. Yet as Chu delved deeper, she discovered surprising upsides, such as the benefits of memorization, competition as a motivator, and the Chinese cultural belief in hard work over innate talent.

 

Lively and intimate, beautifully written and reported, Little Soldiers asks us to reconsider the true value and purpose of education, as China and the West compete for the political and economic dominance of a new generation.

 

Leftover In China: The Women Shaping The World’s Next Superpower



By: Roseann Lake

@ Garden Books: RMB 270

 

Factory Girls meets The Vagina Monologues in this fascinating narrative on China’s single women―and why they could be the source of its economic future.

 

Forty years ago, China enacted the one-child policy, only recently relaxed. Among many other unintended consequences, it resulted in both an enormous gender imbalance―with a predicted twenty million more men than women of marriage age by 2020―and China’s first generations of only-daughters. Given the resources normally reserved for boys, these girls were pushed to study, excel in college, and succeed in careers, as if they were sons.

 

Now living in an economic powerhouse, enough of these women have decided to postpone marriage―or not marry at all―to spawn a label: "leftovers." Unprecedentedly well-educated and goal-oriented, they struggle to find partners in a society where gender roles have not evolved as vigorously as society itself, and where new professional opportunities have made women less willing to compromise their careers or concede to marriage for the sake of being wed. Further complicating their search for a mate, the vast majority of China’s single men reside in and are tied to the rural areas where they were raised. This makes them geographically, economically, and educationally incompatible with city-dwelling “leftovers,” who also face difficulty in partnering with urban men, given the urban men’s general preference for more dutiful, domesticated wives.

 

Part critique of China’s paternalistic ideals, part playful portrait of the romantic travails of China’s trailblazing women and their well-meaning parents who are anxious to see their daughters snuggled into traditional wedlock, Roseann Lake’s Leftover in China focuses on the lives of four individual women against a backdrop of colorful anecdotes, hundreds of interviews, and rigorous historical and demographic research to show how these "leftovers" are the linchpin to China’s future.


Garden Books

Address: 325 Changle Lu

Hours: Daily, 10am-10pm

Tel: 021 5404 8728


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