Customer Reviews

The New Asian Renaissance (Routledge in Asia)

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WARNING:DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!!!!!!!! Reading this book could cause spontaneous combustion of your head. Even more dull than watching golf, reading this book is like suffacating yourself with a plastic bag. Its dismal, monotonous narrative will put you to sleep in under five seconds, a new world record. There is now one less sane person in this world beacause of this book. May God have mercy on the poor souls who have been afflicted by this fiery creature from Hell. It is interesting to note that the overwhelming majority of copies of this book available are used. That means that eight out of every thirteen people will break into an uncontrollable seizure when reading this book. The $37.95 I paid for this book would have been better spent on a large bucket of horse manure. The most interesting part of the book would have to be a tie between the blank inside cover and the blank inside back cover. The scripts for made-for-TV movies are better written than this book. A better-quality read for the nearly the same price is Textual Scholarship: An Introduction, by D.C. Greetham. Just listen to the editor's praise of this virtuous book: The author is founder of the Society for Textual Scholarship. He writes to emphasize the continuities in the several parts of textual scholarship and to present the field in terms of a single narrative--a sequence from the discovery and enumeration of the text, to the history of its production, to its transcription and rendering into another medium (the modern typeset page), to its editing and its elucidation by annotation and commentary.

This intrepid book, available for the modest price of $34.95, is a clear alternative to Dante's ninth level of Hell. Because of NAR, everyone in the world is now less intelligent. Francois Godement, I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

This book is absolutely dreadful. It made me want to cry. You cannot sit down and read this book. It is so horribly written that the reader loses all interest, even during the interesting parts of history, such as world war two. Pick something else to read.

Godement has failed in every sense of theword to convey any sort of new understanding to the war, except hiswild and untrue hallucinations with regard to the Japanese occupation. I can not understand at all how this "Western" Frenchman can even pass as a historian of "Asia". Relegating his writing to the realm of pure fiction, Godement either states the plainly obvious or the comically false. He constantly praises the Japanese for deeds that include the neglectable stimulation of Asian industry. I, however, would hardly call the atrocities committed by them to be anything by barbarous. Making only passing mention to the murderous attitude of the Japanese, he fails to underline perhaps the most neglected aspect of the war by Westerners. He makes it a point to tell the reader that Japan has made reparations for the war, when, in fact there are no reparations that can be made for the murderous acts. Until this day, there is no record of an international apology from Japan. Later Godement stresses the fact that Japan had encouraged the independence of the Southeast Asian countries that it conquered. In this, though, he fails to mention the many killed for their anit-Japanese stacne or to put in consideration the fact that these actions were done out of a realization of their imminent loss to the Americans. Perhaps most infuriating is the fact that he hardly discusses the takeover of Nanking. Godement cites that over 100,000 people were killed, but fails to record a source. One can only wonder whether this figure was created by a magic wand for there are actually records of more than twice as much. He dismisses this act that possibly shook the world to its core as "another conquest" by the Japanese. If his goal was to paint the Japanese in a well-rounded light, he only was able to paint them in a distubingly positive light. In fact, it is arguable that there was anything positive to be said. The destruction of the economic and social stability of a continent is nothing to be happy about. More sadistic is trying to shed some positive light upon incidents by saying that Japan was actually doing some "good". On a personal note, I feel that anyone who is able to see the occupation as a period of "modernisation" is definitely a medieval and violence-hungering beast. Spending more than half the chapter on the World War discussing the development activities of the Japanese during their ruthless occupation, he entirely misses the point of why this war was such a turning point in the view of humanity. He completely fails to highlight the pertinent aspects of the war. Among all this ignorant writing is a failing to understand any of the core values that make Asia unique as a continent. He calls Buddhism "fatalistic", a view that can easily attributed to the "Western" and "Christian" view of things. Furthermore, he gives no indication of a slight appreciation for the culture of the region, often saying that it was better the West conquered it without even putting himself in the shoes of his subjects. Writing as an intellectual calmly observing the horrors of the Pacific wars, he does little more than to show off his skewed and masochistic way of thinking. To summarize Godement's logic I'd like to ask: If your wife were raped by an invading army, would the child she bore be a good thing or a bad thing? Undoubtedly, his answer would be a resounding yes, it would be a good thing. END