The Yin and Yang of American Culture


Book Description

You can't not have a reaction to this book! Based on over thirty years of conversations and interactions with Americans and Asians, Korean American Eun Kim presents American virtues and vices from an Asian perspective, using the ancient Asian concepts of yin and yang, which coexist in everything and complete each other to maintain cosmic harmony. In this way, Kim draws us to look at the yang (light) mirror of American vices and the yin (dark) mirror or American virtues. Examples of the virtues she discusses are generosity, competitive spirit, openness, and volunteerism. Some of the vices she explores are insistence on rights, refusal to grow up, arrogance, and tolerance of violence. In her fifty entries, the author describes and illustrates an American value and provides an Asian perspective on it as well as what she believes to be the dangers and opportunities inherent to each value. She uses personal experience, anecdotes and quotes from Asians and Americans both famous and unknown, historical background, general wisdom, and proverbs to enrich her writing. Eun Kim straddles two cultures, her Asian homeland and her adopted country, the United States. This is a highly personal and readable book, with insights that may make the American reader squirm uncomfortably in one paragraph and glow with pride in the next.




American Nations


Book Description

• A New Republic Best Book of the Year • The Globalist Top Books of the Year • Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Non-fiction Particularly relevant in understanding who voted for who during presidential elections, this is an endlessly fascinating look at American regionalism and the eleven “nations” that continue to shape North America According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future. From the Deep South to the Far West, to Yankeedom to El Norte, Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) reveals how each region continues to uphold its distinguishing ideals and identities today, with results that can be seen in the composition of the U.S. Congress or on the county-by-county election maps of any hotly contested election in our history.




Yin-Yang


Book Description

China has become one of the largest study and teach-abroad, travel, and business destinations in the world. Yet few books offer a diversity of perspectives and locales for Westerners considering the leap. This unique collection of letters offers a rarely seen, intimate, and refreshingly honest view of living and working in China. Here, ordinary people—recent college graduates, teachers, professors, engineers, lawyers, computer whizzes, and parents— recount their experiences in venues ranging from classrooms to marketplaces to holy mountains. The writers are genuine participants in the daily life of their adopted country, and woven throughout their correspondence is the compelling theme of outsiders coping in a culture that is vastly foreign to them and the underlying love-hate struggle it engenders. We follow their initial highs; the shift to general discomfort and then to full-blown culture shock; and slowly, the return of a sense of balance, identity, and normalcy; and finally, the decision to return home or stay. Written in a down-to-earth, personal, often humorous, always authentic style, these tales of trials, successes, and failures offer invaluable insight into a country that remains endlessly fascinating.




One Nation, Two Cultures


Book Description

From one of today's most respected historians and cultural critics comes a new book examining the gulf in American society--a division that cuts across class, racial, ethnic, political and sexual lines. One side originated in the tradition of republican virtue, the other in the counterculture of the late 1960s. Himmelfarb argues that, while the latter generated the dominant culture of today-particularly in universities, journalism, television, and film--a "dissident culture" continues to promote the values of family, a civil society, sexual morality, privacy, and patriotism. Proposing democratic remedies for our moral and cultural diseases, Himmelfarb concludes that it is a tribute to Americans that we remain "one nation" even as we are divided into "two cultures."




The Yin and Yang of Climate Crisis


Book Description

Marrying western environmentalism with Chinese medicine, this revolutionary book illustrates the many ways that our personal well-being and climate health are vitally connected Crises such as melting ice caps, dying forests, and devastating floods are symptoms of deeper issues, both within us as individuals and within our culture. Informed by author Brendan Kelly's experience as a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, The Yin and Yang of Climate Crisis reveals that the current life-threatening severity of climate change speaks to the level of imbalance that exists in the people and institutions responsible for the crisis. Considering issues such as loss of life from increasingly severe storms, stress on farmers from rapidly changing weather, and increasing rates of disease, this book goes on to present hopeful, deep-reaching personal and societal remedies to treat the underlying causes of climate change and to restore our own health. The Yin and Yang of Climate Crisis blends the external focus of environmentalism—western science, policy issues, regulations—with the internal focus of Chinese medicine—personal health, balancing Qi, diet—to present a holistic view of our interrelationship with the planet. Kelly provides a deeper look at how we've gotten to this place of climate destabilization and ways to treat both the symptoms and their root causes. Looking through the lens of Chinese medicine, we are better able to understand that the severity of climate destabilization speaks to deeper philosophical and spiritual issues and provides an opportunity to address our own personal and collective imbalances. With his unique perspective and far-reaching perceptions, Kelly encourages us to translate the reality of our warming planet into an opportunity to ask bigger and deeper questions, including who we are, what we're here to do, and what promotes health and healing.




American Cultural Baggage


Book Description




Understanding Vietnam


Book Description

The American experience in Vietnam divided us as a nation and eroded our confidence in both the morality and the effectiveness of our foreign policy. Yet our understanding of this tragic episode remains superficial because, then and now, we have never grasped the passionate commitment with which the Vietnamese clung to and fought over their own competing visions of what Vietnam was and what it might become. To understand the war, we must understand the Vietnamese, their culture, and their ways of looking at the world. Neil L. Jamieson, after many years of living and working in Vietnam, has written the book that provides this understanding. Jamieson paints a portrait of twentieth-century Vietnam. Against the background of traditional Vietnamese culture, he takes us through the saga of modern Vietnamese history and Western involvement in the country, from the coming of the French in 1858 through the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Throughout his analysis, he allows the Vietnamese—both our friends and foes, and those who wished to be neither—to speak for themselves through poetry, fiction, essays, newspaper editorials and reports of interviews and personal experiences. By putting our old and partial perceptions into this new and broader context, Jamieson provides positive insights that may perhaps ease the lingering pain and doubt resulting from our involvement in Vietnam. As the United States and Vietnam appear poised to embark on a new phase in their relationship, Jamieson's book is particularly timely.




American Chinese Restaurants


Book Description

With case studies from the USA, Canada, Chile, and other countries in Latin America, American Chinese Restaurants examines the lived experiences of what it is like to work in a Chinese restaurant. The book provides ethnographic insights on small family businesses, struggling immigrant parents, and kids working, living, and growing up in an American Chinese restaurant. This is the first book based on personal histories to document and analyze the American Chinese restaurant world. New narratives by various international and American contributors have presented Chinese restaurants as dynamic agencies that raise questions on identity, ethnicity, transnationalism, industrialization, (post)modernity, assimilation, public and civic spheres, and socioeconomic differences. American Chinese Restaurants will be of interest to general readers, scholars, and college students from undergraduate to graduate level, who wish to know Chinese restaurant life and understand the relationship between food and society.




American Born Chinese


Book Description

A tour-de-force by rising indy comics star Gene Yang, American Born Chinese tells the story of three apparently unrelated characters: Jin Wang, who moves to a new neighborhood with his family only to discover that he's the only Chinese-American student at his new school; the powerful Monkey King, subject of one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables; and Chin-Kee, a personification of the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, who is ruining his cousin Danny's life with his yearly visits. Their lives and stories come together with an unexpected twist in this action-packed modern fable. American Born Chinese is an amazing ride, all the way up to the astonishing climax. American Born Chinese is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature, the winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, an Eisner Award nominee for Best Coloring and a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year. This title has Common Core Connections




Hannah is My Name


Book Description

A young Chinese girl and her parents immigrate to the United States and try their best to assimilate into their San Francisco neighborhood while anxiously awaiting the arrival of their green cards.