The Art of War Plus The Ancient Chinese Revealed [Hardcover]

Sun Tzu (Author)

Book Description

Series: Art of War Plus | Publication Date: January 14, 2003

Improving on all other versions of Sun Tzu's The Art of War, this translation is an award-winning, gift-quality hardcover book priced like a paperback. The left-hand pages contain the original Chinese ideograms individually translated while the facing right-hand page contains the English sentence translation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

...one of the best...internally consistent...a level of knowledge and detail...not present in some other translations. -- Midwest Book Review, October 2002

Best Multicultural Non-Fiction Title of 2003! -- Independent Publisher's Book Awards

About the Author

Gary Gagliardi is America's leading expert on using the Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. He has created three ground-breaking works on Sun Tzu. 1) He authored the first published English-language transliteration of The Art of War. 2) He mapped the key elements of Sun Tzu’s competitive system into graphical diagrams, following the traditional methodology used all ancient Chinese sciences. 3) He developed a 306 page, stanza-by-stanza explanation of Sun Tzu’s competitive system in the terms of modern competitive principles and game theory.

Mr. Gagliardi has also written a large number of other adaptations applying Sun Tzu’s methods to everything from career building, management, running a small business, marketing, selling, and even romance and parenting.

Mr. Gagliardi began studying Sun Tzu 30 years ago, using Sun Tzu's secrets in a successful career in sales, marketing, and management. He went on to start his own software company (which became a multimillion dollar business, twice appearing on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies) developing his first Sun Tzu adaptation for his company's distributors and sales people. In 1996, he sold his company, to focus full time on speaking and writing about Sun Tzu's strategic principles.

Gary lives near Seattle with his wife.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Clearbridge Publishing; 1st Hardcover Ed edition (January 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1929194196
• ISBN-13: 978-1929194193
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,042,149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Inferior but useful., May 15, 2006

By 

A. Padilla (El Paso, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of War Plus The Ancient Chinese Revealed (Hardcover)

Gagliardi's book is useful in that it offers the original chinese text with an attempt to define each ideogram of the text. It's also readable. That's all for it's good points.

On the following points, I regard this work as inferior:
1. The language is designed to appeal to a certain readership, the businessman.
2. The author knows neither chinese, nor does he seem to be well-versed in ancient chinese culture and history, and this adversely affects the self-proclaimed "accuracy" of the translation.
3. Ancient commentaries are omitted.
4. He fails to identify the "popular translation" which contains the errors he describes. I'm unable to find those particular errors where he says in any of the other translations I have.

This is the second worst translation I have.

I have 17 editions of the Art of War and 13 different translations, including two in spanish, one in italian, and one in German. For truly scholarly english translations, I would recommend Roger T. Ames, or Ralph D. Sawyer's. They offer historical background on Ancient China and many other details...AND they know chinese.

For a more strategic treatment, I would recommend Samuel Griffith's work which contains a foreward by B.H. Liddel-Hart, and also a comparison to Mao Tse-Tungs work on Strategy.

If you are still antsy to purchase Gagliardi's "work," bear in mind: It's written to sell, not to educate. And from here on out, I find that I can NEVER trust a book review from Midwest Book Review. (Another glowing review can be found on the back of the book itself.)

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It doesn't seem that accurate, April 21, 2005

By 

cyberalchemist (Glebe, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Art of War Plus The Ancient Chinese Revealed (Hardcover)

I've just bought the book swayed by the award for translation. So what do I think?

Well they don't translate the same character by the same word. For example in the first chapter they translate gai (plan) as 'philosophy', when later on the same page they translate tao as 'philosophy', a translation i would dispute to begin with. Further down the page, I would prefer to translate the line saying that one's followers must not fear danger and dishonesty, as saying they must not fear their leader's betrayal and dishonesty.

In section 5 of chapter 1 the words characters meaning 'temple' are given in the chinese side of the page and not mentioned at all in the translation. In fact the whole of section 5 seems innacurate.

Ok I might well be wrong, I'm no scholar of Chinese, but is the author? Has he convinced people because it reads well (which it does) and because he insists on the accuracy of his version?

On the other hand, it is clear that a translation with chinese text with character translation is better than no chinese text at all. Sun Tzu is notoriously hard to translate, or to read in chinese for that matter.

While I can't recommend the text, and feel a bit 'done in' as it were, still the best thing for someone with no Chinese is to read lots of different English versions, and then look at a chinese version as supplied here and work it out yourself. This is a perfectly adequate version to start with.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Competent at best, inaccurate at worse..., November 27, 2004

By 

Luke - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Art of War Plus The Ancient Chinese Revealed (Hardcover)

Whoever this Gary Gagliardi is, his mastery of the Chinese language leaves much to be desired; looking at his credentials, it sounds suspiciously as if he missed out mentioning one thing...hmmm, does he *know* Chinese? For one thing, translating the beautifully laconic ancient Chinese into brash staccato lines of poetry simply does not work; worse is his frequent mistranslations -- the character "ye" is often translated as "also", when it simply means "period" in an age where punctuation wasn't invented yet and ideogram characters are still used for sentence closure. Sun-Tzu here comes across as a livid boy scout master trying to rigorously hammer platitudes into our minds. There is this sneaking feeling that much of these "translations" are done using a computer software. Try Ames for a more accurate version. I'm very hard pushed to recommend this edition.