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Seller's Description:
This is an ex-library book and may have the usual library/used-book markings inside. This book has hardback covers. Clean from markings. In good all round condition. Dust jacket in good condition. Please note the Image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item, 550grams, ISBN: 9780670063574.
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Seller's Description:
May have some shelf-wear due to normal use. Your purchase funds free job training and education in the greater Seattle area. Thank you for supporting Goodwill's nonprofit mission!
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Seller's Description:
Near Fine in Near Fine jacket. New York: Viking, September 2007. Hardcover. Book Club Edition. Near Fine b ook in a Near Fine jacket. Interior pristine. Spine straight and very tight; tail slightly bumped. Jacket clean and bright with slight shelfwear to bo ttom edge. Not from a library. No remainder mark. Not clipped. xviii + 332 pages. Zhang Dai (1597-1689), subject of this absorbing and evocative literary-biographical study, was a Chinese essayist and historian whose long life bridged the conquest of China by the Manchus and the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644. The upheaval inspired him to write a history of the Ming as well as personal recollections of his youth, which Spence mines for insights into the culture of this period. Zhang's reminiscences about his earlier life as a well-to-do scholar and aesthete are full of poetic reveries--a treasured blend of tea, evening lanterns in his hometown of Shaoxing, an exquisite courtesan, plum blossoms in the moonlight--which contrast with his later circumstances of poverty, coarse food and wizened, querulous concubines. The memoirs are studded with biographical sketches of his vast extended family, a gallery of eccentrics whose lives furnish handy illustrations of moral precepts. They also open a window on the social world of the late Ming scholarly caste, whose lives revolved around eternal cramming for the examinations that controlled entrée into the imperial bureaucracy; Zhang's father was 53 when he finally passed and was able to get his first job. Through Zhang's Proustian sensibility, Spence retrieves a portrait of a civilization imbued with esoteric obsessions as well as sensuality.