Customer Reviews

The burning forest: Essays on Chinese culture and politics

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In this book and his others, "Simon Leys" (a non-de-plume for Belgian sinologist Pierre Ryckmans) gives some of the best perspectives on Chinese politics and culture you'll ever read.

Besides The Burning Forest, see also The Chairman's New Clothes (1971), Chinese Shadows (1976), and Broken Images (1981). The collection titled The Angel and the Octopus (1999) contains a number of essays on Chinese matters, political and cultural.

His Wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Leys) lists several more, but these are in French only.

The experience of reading Leys/Ryckmans is like having a bucket of cool -- but not cold -- water poured over your head on a hot day.

This book was first published in 1983.

From the author's afterword: "The essays in this collection deal essentially with history, political ethics, ideas, and culture, and also with the problem of how the West interprets China."

Whatever they deal with they do it with great understanding, scholarship and love of China. This inevitably resonates with anyone who cares for China at all and at the same time can't fail to please, stimulate, satisfy anyone else who might merely be reading from idle curiosity - or simple love of books.

For the author is more than a great scholar brilliantly expounding his subject, he's also a great writer, a wonderful writer to read, easy and pleasing.