Tämä sivusto käyttää evästeitä palvelujen toimittamiseen, toiminnan parantamiseen, analytiikkaan ja (jos et ole kirjautunut sisään) mainostamiseen. Käyttämällä LibraryThingiä ilmaiset, että olet lukenut ja ymmärtänyt käyttöehdot ja yksityisyydensuojakäytännöt. Sivujen ja palveluiden käytön tulee olla näiden ehtojen ja käytäntöjen mukaista.
The Fifth Book of Peace opens as Maxine Hong Kingston, driving home from her father's funeral in the early 1990s, discovers that her neighborhood in the Oakland-Berkeley hills is engulfed in flames. Her home burns to the ground, and with it, all her earthly possessions, including her novel-in-progress. Kingston, who at the time was deeply disturbed by the Persian Gulf War, decides that she must understand her own loss of all she possessed as a kind of shadow-experience of war: a lesson about what it would be like to experience up close its utter devastation. Thus she embarks on a mission to re-create her novel from scratch, to rebuild her life, and to reach out to veterans of war and share with them her views as a lover of peace. In the middle section of this remarkable book, Kingston reconstructs for us her lost novel, the lush and compelling story of the Chinese-American Wittman Ah Sing and his wife, Tana -- California artists who flee to Hawaii to evade the draft during the Vietnam War. Wittman and Tana help to create an official Sanctuary for deserters and GIs who've returned devastated by their experiences in Vietnam -- not unlike, as it turns out, the metaphorical sanctuary Maxine creates, back in her real world, by inviting war veterans to participate in writing workshops. As the vets share their stories, she teaches them both the value of writing -- the accurate transcription of what is in the heart -- and the value of community. Paradoxically, the stories of war and its terrors become for her and the vets a literature of peace -- words that enable them to achieve peace, at least within themselves. Moving among the vets with her Buddhist-inflected wisdom and at times humorous self-doubts, weaving their stories together with her own struggle to reorient herself after the fire, Maxine Hong Kingston is at times a kind of sprite, an almost weightless spirit, who guides others toward a better place, and at times a challenging teacher, who will not let us turn from the spectacle of a world so often at war.… (lisätietoja)
“If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation". Thus begins Maxine Hong Kinston's meditative part autobiography, part fiction, part lost spiritual text.
And know devastation she has. Maxine Hong Kingston's home, containing her only copy of a nearly finished book, burned to the ground in the Oakland Hills Fire of 1991. She was returning from her father's funeral when she saw the hills in flames and made an attempt to save her manuscript. The lost novel was entitled ’The Fourth Book of Peace’, inspired by an ancient Chinese tale of three books that were deliberately burned.
Her new book, The Fifth Book of Peace, deals with her efforts to come to terms with her own losses as well as an attempt to understand the suffering of those who are veterans and survivors of war. This luminous book is set in four sections: Fire, a firsthand report of the 1991 inferno; Paper, her search for the original books of peace; Water, a recreation of her lost novel about a couple who flees to Hawaii to avoid the Vietnam War; and Earth, Kingston's moving account of the writing workshops she organized for war veterans.
Kingston, whose ‘woman warrior’ stands as a great source of spiritual strength for many, narrates the personal voyages she undertook through the course of this book, and peppers them with her quiet strength and wisdom. Towards the end, she concludes, "I am coming up with a new rule for living: Only do things that make you happy, and you will create a peaceful world."
Maxine Hong Kingston is one of my favourite authors and this is one of her most thought-provoking works. ( )
The Fifth Book of Peace opens as Maxine Hong Kingston, driving home from her father's funeral in the early 1990s, discovers that her neighborhood in the Oakland-Berkeley hills is engulfed in flames. Her home burns to the ground, and with it, all her earthly possessions, including her novel-in-progress. Kingston, who at the time was deeply disturbed by the Persian Gulf War, decides that she must understand her own loss of all she possessed as a kind of shadow-experience of war: a lesson about what it would be like to experience up close its utter devastation. Thus she embarks on a mission to re-create her novel from scratch, to rebuild her life, and to reach out to veterans of war and share with them her views as a lover of peace. In the middle section of this remarkable book, Kingston reconstructs for us her lost novel, the lush and compelling story of the Chinese-American Wittman Ah Sing and his wife, Tana -- California artists who flee to Hawaii to evade the draft during the Vietnam War. Wittman and Tana help to create an official Sanctuary for deserters and GIs who've returned devastated by their experiences in Vietnam -- not unlike, as it turns out, the metaphorical sanctuary Maxine creates, back in her real world, by inviting war veterans to participate in writing workshops. As the vets share their stories, she teaches them both the value of writing -- the accurate transcription of what is in the heart -- and the value of community. Paradoxically, the stories of war and its terrors become for her and the vets a literature of peace -- words that enable them to achieve peace, at least within themselves. Moving among the vets with her Buddhist-inflected wisdom and at times humorous self-doubts, weaving their stories together with her own struggle to reorient herself after the fire, Maxine Hong Kingston is at times a kind of sprite, an almost weightless spirit, who guides others toward a better place, and at times a challenging teacher, who will not let us turn from the spectacle of a world so often at war.
And know devastation she has. Maxine Hong Kingston's home, containing her only copy of a nearly finished book, burned to the ground in the Oakland Hills Fire of 1991. She was returning from her father's funeral when she saw the hills in flames and made an attempt to save her manuscript. The lost novel was entitled ’The Fourth Book of Peace’, inspired by an ancient Chinese tale of three books that were deliberately burned.
Her new book, The Fifth Book of Peace, deals with her efforts to come to terms with her own losses as well as an attempt to understand the suffering of those who are veterans and survivors of war. This luminous book is set in four sections: Fire, a firsthand report of the 1991 inferno; Paper, her search for the original books of peace; Water, a recreation of her lost novel about a couple who flees to Hawaii to avoid the Vietnam War; and Earth, Kingston's moving account of the writing workshops she organized for war veterans.
Kingston, whose ‘woman warrior’ stands as a great source of spiritual strength for many, narrates the personal voyages she undertook through the course of this book, and peppers them with her quiet strength and wisdom. Towards the end, she concludes, "I am coming up with a new rule for living: Only do things that make you happy, and you will create a peaceful world."
Maxine Hong Kingston is one of my favourite authors and this is one of her most thought-provoking works. ( )