Reviews: Book

Illustration of the Pig in the Chinese Zodiac

The book paints a colorful picture of the pig which comes last among the 12 zodiac animals in China's calendar.

With the help of illustrations all featuring the Pig such as paper-cuttings, paintings, pottery and sculpture, the book explains the symbolic meaning of the Pig as standing for honesty, luck and wealth.

It also elaborates related customs and folklores. For example, if a baby is born on the Year of the Pig, the mother will do a paper-cutting in the shape of a pig and stick it to the baby's bed. It is believed to bless him or her forever.

The book is one of a series illustrating all the 12 zodiac animals including Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster and Dog.

The series , in Chinese, is published by World Publishing Corporation and priced at 588 yuan ($76).

Shi Pengyun

Girls will be boys

Michael Dillon wanted nothing more than to be invisible, to be one of the guys. Problem: he was born with a woman's body. Everything he did toward realizing his humble dream - the cross-dressing, the hormones and surgeries and the chimera that resulted - pushed it further from his grasp. He went through life as the most visible sort of human being: a physical anomaly. He was the first person on record to undergo surgery (13 operations between 1946 and 1949) to change his gender. Pagan Kennedy, the author of "Black Livingstone" and other books, does for Dillon what he never succeeded in doing for himself. She makes us see him as an ordinary, sane Englishman, worthy of respect and acceptance. ... Dillon's story, as Kennedy tells it, is itself a chimera: part biography, part medical history. Here the surgery is seamless, the hybrid better than the sum of its parts.

The First Man-Made Man is oddly mesmerizing, as close to Shakespearean tragedy as you can come with the words "tube pedicle" and "mast of cartilage" in your book.

NYT Syndicate

Headline News

To whom shall we entrust the rendering of this moment and its attendant verities - the artist or the correspondent, the purveyors of fictions or the gatherers of facts? And who gets to play gatekeeper in this game? The question, both plot device and intellectual premise, animates Surveillance, the gripping new novel by Jonathan Raban, a British writer who for years has embedded himself in America, earning acclaim for his fresh-eyed travelogues and journalism...

Surveillance leans out from today's headlines to sniff at a horizon that is within walking distance, a Seattle that might not be 2007 yet edges no further into the calendar than 2008. An overly familiar America, accurately portrayed and perforce underimagined. What's new? One hardly needs a crystal ball: national identity cards, stone-faced soldiers manning checkpoints, an economy in the pits, intensified global warming. Bush still seems to be president, the nation remains divided, Iraq is Iraq. ... What happens then among ... (the five characters in the book) ... is a replay of the polarized polemics any sentient citizen has been exposed to throughout the past six years. ...

There's plenty of talk in Surveillance about who reads what and why. ... It's during the denouement of the deceptively modest plot that the big message is delivered ...

The novel unmasks itself as an elaborate, ingenious frame for a discourse ... We're tossed onto the stage of a profound truth, where literature outperforms anything else.

NYT Syndicate

(China Daily 03/21/2007 page20)