Customer Rating:  
Summary: Not my favourite lecture
Comment: Yet I was looking forward to read it when it was about to be launched this book bored and amazed me at the same time.
This book shows how religion fills the gap explaining the inexplicable of the natural world to the pre-agricultural societies thus putting mankind in its appropiate role. We see the industrial World bursting in the old grassland to destroy it. We witness how the wolf totem represents that balanced natural world where humankind takes part without the prominence that we assume in our modern world. At the very end we can even feel the agony of a unfulfilled dream: we cannot understand the old world without destroying it.
I felt that the prose, the rythm of the story and the characters were unappropiate for such an emotional tale.
Customer Rating:
Summary: All our yesterdays.
Comment: Such a complete engagement with a culture as alien as life on the Mongolian grasslands will not be everybody's cup of tea but it captures brilliantly how tiny incremental changes have wider repercussions on the society, gradually undermining it. The Chinese author was twelve years with the Mongolians and so he was not just passing through. It is NOT a novel about the triumph of the human spirit.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Compelling and insightful
Comment: Based on the author's own experiences, this doesn't work quite so well as a novel - the characters serve mainly as mouthpieces for information and argument - but as an insightful exploration of traditional Mongolian life, this is richly compelling, particularly the place of the wolf in the ecology, culture and history of the Mongolian people. There is much to admire in the descriptive writing and the sense of place is very well conveyed as is the complex ecology of the Mongolian grassland and the ease with which insensitive and dogmatic economic policies can destroy it.
Recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: No Wolf in Sheep's Clothing - A Great Read
Comment: This book has had a major impact in China since its publication because of it's thoughtful and critical narrative of the destruction of a centuries old ecosystem in inner Mongolia as agrarian China rubbed up against and overcame a hunting / herding culture. This theme is well told through the story of a young man's fascination with wolves and their cultural, economic and social significance to Mongolian culture and in particular his attempt to bring up a wolf cub. Occasional lapses into a kind of polemic style do not detract from the engaging story, with numerous insights into Chinese and Mongolian history and culture, excellently translated by Howard Goldblatt. A really good read which offers non-Chinese speakers an insight into a thoughtful discussion about China's impact on the environment.
|
