Today marks the anniversary of the Chinese warlord Koxinga’s victory over the Dutch during the Sino-Dutch War–China’s first war with Europe. Emory University has put together this fun book trailer for Tonio Andrade and his new book Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West, which shows how Koxinga outfoxed the Dutch at every turn to capture Taiwan:

Happy Year of the Dragon!

FACT: “On the night of July 7, 1937, skirmishes between Chinese and Japanese troops near Beijing’s Marco Polo Bridge broke out, marking the beginning of World War II in China. The fighting quickly spread, and by month end Japanese forces had consolidated control over the region. An all-out assault on Shanghai in August, followed by the December slaughter of civilians and soldiers in Nanjing, forced the Nationalist government to flee. Chiang Kai-shek led his troops and supporters first to Wuhan, then to Sichuan, where he set up a temporary capital in Chongqing in October 1938.”

Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953
by Janet Y. Chen

In the early twentieth century, a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval in China, poverty became the focus of an anguished national conversation about the future of the country. Investigating the lives of the urban poor in China during this critical era, Guilty of Indigence examines the solutions implemented by a nation attempting to deal with “society’s most fundamental problem.” Interweaving analysis of shifting social viewpoints, the evolution of poor relief institutions, and the lived experiences of the urban poor, Janet Chen explores the development of Chinese attitudes toward urban poverty and of policies intended for its alleviation.

Along with “quit smoking” or “lose weight,” “save more” is consistently one of the most popular new year’s resolutions. But that’s easier said than done, especially when millions of Americans still lack access to a basic bank account.

Sheldon Garon, Princeton professor and author of Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves, argues that there are ways to change that. In addition to the new reforms and protections recommended by the Dodd-Frank Act and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the U.S. Postal Service could provide services similar to the postal banks still popular in countries with high personal savings rates–such as Belgium, France, and Germany. In the process, the USPS might also “save” itself from its well-publicized financial woes.

Professor Garon recently talked with Kiyoshi Okonogi of the Asahi Shimbun about postal savings and other possible solutions–read the full Q&A here. (See also Reid Cramer’s post at the New America Foundation’s The Ladder blog, Felix Salmon’s article at Reuters, and Tim Fernholtz’s post at GOOD.)

Gregory Mills of the Urban Institute‘s MetroTrends blog wrote up a post earlier this week about the importance of making it easier for would-be small savers to access basic financial services. He goes on to argue that the U.S. could seriously benefit from “modern-day, higher-tech equivalents” of school or postal savings banks.

Want to add your two cents to the discussion? Prof. Garon will be speaking with Marty Moss Coane on WHYY’s “Radio Times” this coming Tuesday, January 3rd–call in with your questions!

Princeton Professor Sheldon Garon has done a few major interviews so far this week to discuss the big ideas in his new book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves.

His recent Q&A with NPR’s senior business editor Marilyn Geewax is the most popular post on the NPR site today: http://www.npr.org/2011/12/05/143149947/why-americans-spend-too-much

And Kimberly Blanton of the Squared Away Blog of the Financial Security Project at Boston College recently spoke with Prof. Garon about savings rates, “over-indebtedness,” and America’s “unusual” Christmas shopping season: http://fsp.bc.edu/united-states-of-credit/

You can also check out Prof. Garon’s interview yesterday with Marilyn Geewax and host Michel Martin on “Tell Me More” from NPR News: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=143141870

Daniel A. Bell, co-author with Avner de-Shalit of The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age, was sent this fantastic iPad drawing of a recent book talk he gave at the Beijing Bookworm store:

Artist Wu Peng was in the audience at the talk–how cool is that!

If that wasn’t enough, Debra Bruno recently wrote a blog article featuring Daniel A. Bell and the book at The Atlantic Cities blog, which Chicago magazine’s staff blog The 312 picked up earlier today, with a Windy City twist.

Norway’s biggest bank DnB NOR is banking on customers, well, banking on their clever new commercial to promote personal savings accounts. In it, a dazed newlywed wakes up in a luxurious white hotel room after a night of partying only to discover that eternal bachelor George Clooney has put a (giant diamond) ring on it:

The tag line reads, “Some people are lucky in life. For the rest of us, saving up can be smart.” DnB NOR’s ad has gone viral this week, with major newspapers such as Britain’s Independent and Australia’s Telegraph and gossip bloggers such as Perez Hilton posting it to the delight of their readers across the globe.

Funny viral video aside, countries in Europe and Asia share a common modern history of promoting small saving, which is the subject of Princeton professor Sheldon Garon‘s forthcoming book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves. Garon’s sweeping transnational history shows how nations such as Germany and Japan have encouraged a culture of thrift by supporting government and private institutions that single-mindedly promote popular savings and wage savings campaigns.

Do you think U.S. banks should start personal savings campaigns featuring stars like Clooney? Tell us what you think in the comments section, and become an early fan of Garon’s forthcoming title on Facebook.

We are about to celebrate the publication of the paperback version of Mumbai Fables by Gyan Prakash, so the timing of this interview with The Times of India is particularly good.

Prakash’s thoughts on tabloid journalism (particularly of the Indian tabloid Blitz):

Journalists often act as ethnographers, digging under surface reality to decode the urban labyrinth. Tabloids take this to another level. With their screaming headlines, shocking stories and photographs, they present the city as a place of sensations.

Prakash on why his history of Mumbai is written as a series of distinct chapters that illuminate parts of the city’s history:

Mumbai had been on my mind since childhood as a figure of imagination…I was moved by its images, the stories the city told about itself and others narrated about its rise from seven islets to a single island city…As a historian, i wanted to understand where these stories came from.

Read the complete article here: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-09-02/edit-page/30101735_1_bambai-politics-tabloid

We have jumped into the high tech world of apps twice now. This is our first offering, based on the best-selling PUP version of The I Ching or Book of Changes. You can read more about the app here, purchase a copy here, or watch the video below to learn more about how to use the app.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the most famous Buddhist text in the West, having sold more than a million copies since it was first published in English in 1927. Acclaimed writer and scholar Donald Lopez writes, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead is not really Tibetan, it is not really a book, and it is not really about death. It is about rebirth: the rebirth of souls and the resurrection of texts….The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a remarkable case of what can happen when American Spiritualism goes abroad.”

The Tibetan Book of the Dead:
A Biography
By Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

In this compelling book, Lopez tells the strange story of how a relatively obscure and malleable collection of Buddhist texts of uncertain origin came to be so revered–and so misunderstood–in the West.

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. His many books include The Story of Buddhism (HarperOne) and Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. He has also edited a number of books by the Dalai Lama.

We invite you to read the introduction online at:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9395.pdf

Also now available in the Lives of Great Religious Books series:

Augustine’s Confessions:
A Biography
By Garry Wills

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison:
A Biography
By Martin E. Marty

“No one in China or Japan applied yellowish pigment to the skin…and no one in the Far East referred to himself as yellow until late in the nineteenth century, when Western racial paradigms, along with many other aspects of modern Western science, were being imported into Chinese and Japanese contexts.”-Michael Keevak, from the introduction of Becoming Yellow

Becoming Yellow:
A Short History of Racial Thinking
By Michael Keevak

In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become “yellow” in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race.

Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University. His books include Sexual Shakespeare, The Pretended Asian, and The Story of a Stele.

We invite you to read the introduction online:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9451.pdf

FACT: Chinese workers in the third century b.c. created seven thousand life-sized terracotta soldiers to guard the tomb of the First Emperor. In the eleventh century a.d., Chinese builders constructed a pagoda from as many as thirty thousand separately carved wooden pieces. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China exported more than a hundred million pieces of porcelain to the West. As these examples show, the Chinese throughout history have produced works of art in astonishing quantities–and have done so without sacrificing quality, affordability, or speed of manufacture.

Ten Thousand Things:
Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art
By Lothar Ledderose

Lothar Ledderose takes us on a remarkable tour of Chinese art and culture to explain how artists used complex systems of mass production to assemble extraordinary objects from standardized parts or modules. As he reveals, these systems have deep roots in Chinese thought–in the idea that the universe consists of ten thousand categories of things, for example–and reflect characteristically Chinese modes of social organization.

Ledderose begins with the modular system par excellence: Chinese script, an ancient system of fifty thousand characters produced from a repertoire of only about two hundred components. He shows how Chinese artists used related modular systems to create ritual bronzes, to produce the First Emperor’s terracotta army, and to develop the world’s first printing systems. He explores the dazzling variety of lacquerware and porcelain that the West found so seductive, and examines how works as diverse as imperial palaces and paintings of hell relied on elegant variation of standardized components. Ledderose explains that Chinese artists, unlike their Western counterparts, did not seek to reproduce individual objects of nature faithfully, but sought instead to mimic nature’s ability to produce limitless numbers of objects. He shows as well how modular patterns of thought run through Chinese ideas about personal freedom, China’s culture of bureaucracy, Chinese religion, and even the organization of Chinese restaurants. Originally presented as a series of Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Ten Thousand Things combines keen aesthetic and cultural insights with a rich variety of illustrations to make a profound statement about Chinese art and society.

We invite you to check out more Asian Studies titles at:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/subjects/ar.html

FACT: In 1921 a traveling religious man appeared in eastern British Bengal. Soon residents began to identify this half-naked and ash-smeared sannyasi as none other than the Second Kumar of Bhawal–a man believed to have died twelve years earlier, at the age of twenty-six. So began one of the most extraordinary legal cases in Indian history.

The case would rivet popular attention for several decades as it unwound in courts from Dhaka and Calcutta to London.

A Princely Impostor? tells an incredible story replete with courtroom drama, sexual debauchery, family intrigue, and squandered wealth. With a novelist’s eye for interesting detail, Partha Chatterjee sifts through evidence found in official archives, popular songs, and backstreet Bangladeshi bookshops. He evaluates the case of the man claiming, with the support of legions of tenants and relatives, to be the long-lost Kumar. And he considers the position of the sannyasi’s detractors, including the colonial government and the Kumar’s young widow, who resolutely refused to meet the man she denounced as an impostor.

Along the way, Chatterjee introduces us to a fascinating range of human character, gleans insights into the nature of human identity, and examines the relation between scientific evidence, legal truth, and cultural practice. The story he tells unfolds alongside decades of Indian history. Its plot is shaped by changing gender and class relations and punctuated by critical historical events, including the onset of World War II, the Bengal famine of 1943, and the Great Calcutta Killings. And by identifying the earliest erosion of colonialism and the growth of nationalist thinking within the organs of colonial power, Chatterjee also gives us a secret history of Indian nationalism.

A Princely Impostor?
The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal
By Partha Chatterjee

For more books in our online sale catalog, please visit:
http://press.princeton.edu/booksale/