Xenophon's Anabasis (or "The Persian Expedition", as it is called here) is a classic tale of adventure, and a model of precise style on par with the more familiar works of Roman authors like Julius Caesar (De bello gallico) and Tacitus (Germania). Like Caesar, he uses simple, straightforward language, and the language reflects the character of the man who helped lead 10,000 Greek mercenaries through hostile territory: a man of clear values, determination, ambition, and a strong sense of honor. With Tacitus he shares an interest in odd details and in strange customs of foreign people: "a four days' march of sixty miles took him to the river Chalus, which was a hundred feet in breadth and full of large tame fish which the Syrians regarded as gods and would not allow anyone to harm them. (They think the same way about pigeons.)".

Xenophon's story has an immediacy and clarity that is truly amazing given the fact that he wrote it down 30 years after the events took place, and that we read it today, almost 2,400 years later. The Italian writer Italo Calvino captured the vivid yet factual tone of the Persian Expedition very nicely when he remarked that reading the book today "is the nearest thing to watching an old war documentary which is repeated every so often on television or on video." (Calvino's essay can be found in his collection of essays "Why Read the Classics?") Although the story is a never-ending succession of visual details and action, it is never boring. Xenophon writes succinctly, sprinkles small anecdotes, portraits of soldiers, speeches, and interesting details over the text, and peppers the story with exotic details.

Certain passages of the Persian Expedition reminded me of Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast". Especially in the way both authors employ visual images and celebrate the qualities of food. Hemingway enjoys "the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture"; Xenophon reminisces that "going forward, then, they arrived at the villages where the guides told them they could get supplies. There was plenty of corn there and date wine, and a sour drink made form boiled dates. As for the dates themselves, the sort which one sees in Greece were set aside for the servants, while the ones reserved for the masters were choice fruit, wonderfully big and good looking. Their colour was just like amber, and they used to dry some of them and keep them as sweets." The big difference, however, is that the aging Hemingway recreated the joy of his best years in Paris whereas the old Xenophon wrote an account of the most challenging weeks of his life.

Xenophon is not only a very fine writer, he is also a man whose writing reveals his ethics. As it befits the writer who does not want to hit his readers on the head with a sermon, his morality is implicit in the style in which he writes, and in the tone of his story. Xenophon is not a sufferer, nor is he a stoic. He is an officer, a professional soldier. Xenophon's morality is that of a man of action who decides on right and wrong by looking at what he needs to do in order to master a given situation: "what we have to do is to surmount our difficulties like brave men, not to give in, but to try, if we can, to win honour and safety by victory." Italo Calvino sensed in this attitude a precursor to the modern ethic of perfect technical efficiency, but in my opinion, Xenophon's ethics are more informed by a sense of commitment to the men he commands and the gods he respects. Xenophon strives to do his job well in order to generate discipline, solidarity and trust among his men, which is necessary not only for surviving the hardships of the journey but also for keeping one's dignity. He knows the psyche of his soldiers ("when people are not trusted, their words, I notice, merely drift about without force in themselves and without inspiring confidence in others") and he knows how to motivate them ("there will be a great rise in their spirits if one can change the way they think, so that instead of having in their heads the one idea of 'what is going to happen to me?' they may think 'what action am I going to take?'").

Even if one can not enjoy Xenophon's qualities as a storyteller, or if one does not agree with his ethics, the Persian Expedition is still a fine example of how literature can give style and sense to a military debacle and a desperate adventure which, being a retreat after a defeat, is not honorable or heroic in itself.

Hiroshima Notes is a collection of seven essays written between August 1963 and January 1965 on the occasion of several visits by Mr. Oe to Hiroshima. The year 1963 was a watershed for Kenzaburo Oe. In 1963, his son was born with a lesion of the skull through which brain tissue protruded. Unable to decide if he should allow the child to die or agree to an operation which would leave his son permanently brain-damaged, Mr. Oe went on a reporting assignment to Hiroshima that resulted in "a decisive turnabout" of his life which, he says, "eschewing all religious connotations, I would still call a conversion".

The central figure of the essays is Dr. Fumio Shigeta, a medical doctor who was in Hiroshima on the day the A-bomb was dropped. He happened to arrive in the city to take up a new post just a week before the day of the bombing. It is through Dr. Shigeta that Oe learns how the bomb victims become social outcasts, have difficulties finding marital partners, get divorced because they cannot have children, hide in shame in the back-rooms of their houses for years, and commit suicide or go insane upon learning that they are diagnosed as having "an A-bomb disease". In the midst of this pain and suffering, Dr. Shigeta patiently applies his medical skills to help the victims. He ignores the stigma placed on the victims by Japanese society, and for him there is no taboo on issues like the genetic effects of the radiation.

Dr. Shigeta is the "authentic man" for Oe, a person who is "humanist in the truest sense ¡V neither too wildly desperate nor too vainly hopeful". A man of modesty, patience and perseverance, Dr. Shigeta appears to be the real-life counterpart of the fictional Docteur Rieux of Albert Camus's novel The Plague: "When Hiroshima was attacked by radiation - the plague of the modern age - the city was not specifically closed off. Since that day . . . Dr. Shigeta took upon himself the misery of Hiroshima, and has continued to do so for twenty years."

More than anything he saw in Hiroshima, it must have been the example of Dr. Shigeta that made Oe realize that there was just one answer to his own personal question whether his son should be operated to live brain-damaged thereafter or be left to die. If Dr. Shigeta could bear the suffering of thousands of strangers and dedicate his life to relieving their pain, then he could bear the suffering of raising a brain-damaged son. I believe it was this realization that made Oe wake up and face his own suffering: "I think it was in Hiroshima that I got my first concrete insight into human authenticity."

While the Hiroshima Notes are the central document of Oe's humanism, they also provide a uniquely Japanese view of the Hiroshima bombing. Oe examines the feelings of shame and humiliation in the victims, and the attempts of the people of Hiroshima to forget what he calls the "holocaust of the A-bomb". His tone is very restrained and unemotional, devoid of moralizing and anger. Any sensationalism is missing from Oe's writing. He does not accuse or explain, he simply reflects. At times, though, he gets tangled in his reflections. The most embarrassing example is his argument that the A-bomb would never have been dropped on Leopoldville in the Congo because the American decision makers wanted to drop the bomb only on a people with the "human strength to cope with the hell that would follow." This racist, muddled thesis is an absolute exception, however. A small stain on Oe's essays which shows that even a Nobel Prize winner with a conscience will get caught up in prejudices from time to time.

I recommend these essays to anyone who has read Kenzaburo Oe's "A Personal Matter" (the fictional account of the decision the author had to make with regard to his son), and to anyone who ever had to answer the question "why should I rather follow one course of action instead of another when both options involve me suffering?"

This small volume might be the perfect gift for the aficionado who owns all the other important biographies on Mozart.

Norbert Elias was a sociologist by profession. Looking at the life of Mozart, he asked what influence did the society in which Mozart grew up have on his development as an artist. Elias did not try to explain the nature of genius in terms of sociology, as the subtitle of the US translation implies. Rather, he tried to put Mozart's genius in perspective. The German title of the book made this quite clear: "Mozart. Zur Soziologie eines Genies", which translates roughly as "Mozart: Sociological aspects of a genius". The charm of the book really lies in the fact that Elias did not try to explain away the mystery of genius.

As a small extra for anyone who has ever wondered why so many important composers came from German speaking countries (Bach, Haendel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, etc.), whereas France and England produced few composers of the same stature during this period, Elias's essay has a neat, little theory which provides some answers. It also warms the hearts of economists, by the way.

Mr. Bly's collection includes the two most famous poems by Rilke, Der Panther ("The panther") and Herbsttag ("October Day"), but mostly it reflects the editor's personal taste. For example, he omits the Duino Elegies because, among other things, he is not convinced they belong to Rilke's best work: "There's something about them that is admirable but not likeable."

Bly has a good sense for the troubled life of Rilke and the inner strength that enabled Rilke to produce his art (a situation not unlike that of Hermann Hesse, whose poems Rilke once classified as being "on the verge of art"). Despite Rilke's neuroticism, his rootlessness, and his difficult relationships, for Bly, Rilke "stands for toughness, freedom from self-pity, ability to work, whatever one's life situation."

Bly states that he wants to be true to the sound of the poems, but his translations are quite matter-of-fact and lose a lot of the lyrical qualities of the German original. If you are looking for a translation that captures the spirit and sound of Rilke's poetry better than Bly's efforts, try Stephen Mitchell's The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (also available in this fine electronic store).

To give you an idea of the difference in quality, let me compare the translations of the first stanza of the first of the Sonnets to Orpheus. The original in German is: Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Uebersteigung! / O Orpheus singt! O hoher Baum im Ohr! / Und alles schweigt. Doch selbst in der Verschweigung / ging neuer Anfang, Wink und Wandlung vor.

Bly translates: A tree rising. What a pure growing! / Orpheus is singing! A tree inside the ear! / Silence, silence. Yet new buildings, / signals, and changes went on in the silence. (nice try at the "s-s" sounds, but why does he drop the "tall" ¡V a nice alliteration to "tree"? And isn't it a bit cruel to the English language to write "buildings ... went on in the silence"?)

Mitchell translates: A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence! / Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear! / And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence / a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

To give you an idea of the genius of the second translation, consider the following: "stieg" means "rose", but "stieg auf" means "ascended"; "ging...vor" means "happened", but "ging...hervor" means "appeared". Mitchell probed the connotations of the German verbs, and pushed their meaning - within the limits of the German original - to achieve a more poignant, vibrating, powerful quality in the English translation. Also, his use of alliteration is much closer to the spirit of the German original. Unable to keep the alliteration of Oh-Ohr, he employs tall-tree and and-all. On a personal note, I very much admire the choice of the verb "hushed" with its "shshsh" sound as a translation for the most important noun in the first stanza: "Verschweigung" (a neologism built from "verschweigen" (to conceal, to be silent), and "Verzweigung" (branching)). The "shshsh" sound keeps the many "s" and "sch" sounds you can hear when you read the first stanza (in German) aloud, and it is just as evocative of the sound of wind in a tree as the German original. That is an amazing achievement.

In this, his most famous book (says the blurb on the cover) Oe examines the devastation, fear and shame of fathering a brain-damaged child. This interpretation is oddly off-mark. "A Personal Matter" does not really examine these issues; it examines how a man avoids facing his own, quite different feelings. A sense of shame does pervade the novel, but it is an emotion that is felt most strongly by characters who think in a more conventionally Japanese way.

Bird, the main character of the novel, is a 27-year old man in a failing marriage. He teaches at a cram school and dreams of escaping to Africa. He is drifting through a life that has no meaning or direction (not that he bothers). The birth of his brain-damaged son forces him to face the question "what is the right thing to do for me?". He dodges the question as long as he can, plunging headlong into a drinking binge, a sexual affair, and eventually a scheme to have his son killed by a quack doctor. But the question does not go away. It is his very own personal matter. No one can help him. The question corners him (not surprisingly, several scenes of the novel prominently feature blind alleys), and finally he finds HIS answer. Or rather, the answer finds him - he did not consciously look for it.

More than anything that is impressive about this novel - the evocation of a stifling atmosphere, the restrained, matter-of-fact tone of the narrator, the stark realism, the depiction of the sense of shame and horror that the birth of a handicapped child evokes in the Japanese - more than all these things I admired how Oe managed to convey a sense of the unconscious humanity of the man Bird (who, after all, does not live up to any moral standards when he begins an affair while, at the same time, his wife is about to give birth in hospital).

The book has a very real background: In 1963, Oe's own son was born with a brain hernia. The doctors predicted that the boy would be severely retarded and gave him little chance of living any significant amount of time. Oe almost decided to abandon the boy. But before he did, he went to a memorial for those killed at Hiroshima, and there he realized that he could not take the easy way out. Today, the boy is as old as I am, and he leads a more or less independent life as an artist in Japan.

Two lions made of bronze guard the entrance of the old Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building on the Bund in Shanghai. One looks cross, the other one snarls. Their paws shine from the touch of thousands of hands. Many people hope that some of the lions' power (and some of the bank's wealth) will rub off on them. The two guards of good fortune even had names once. In the 19th century, the snarler was called Stephen, and the cross lion was called Stitt in honor of their resemblance to two senior managers at the bank's offices in Hong Kong.

This piece of trivia is part of the fun of reading Jan Morris's "Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire". As the subtitle suggests, the main focus of the book is on the British influence in Hong Kong. This is particularly evident in the four chapters that deal with selected periods of the history of Hong Kong: (1) the 1840s when Hong Kong was founded on a barren island as the base for British drug trafficking into China, (2) the 1880s when the colony and the British Empire were at the pinnacle of their power, (3) the 1920s when Shanghai began to eclipse the city, and (4) the 1940s when Hong Kong was occupied by the Japanese and later became the refuge for Chinese (many of them entrepreneurs from Shanghai) who fled the Communist revolution in China. The historical chapters are well-researched, and Morris enjoys elaborating on the quirks of the British in Hong Kong. The historical chapters are embedded in five chapters that take a more anecdotal look at the social, cultural, administrative, and economic aspects of life in Hong Kong. The chapter on administration is aptly named "Control Systems". Not surprisingly for Hong Kong, the most extensive and interesting chapter deals with business and the economy. "Means of Support" is a very understated title for this aspect of life in Hong Kong. It would be more fitting to call it "Get rich quick". Jan Morris knows how to sprinkle delightful illustrations of Chinese industriousness and entrepreneurial talent into her tale. With a smirk she revels in the "endless variety of ingenuity, given to the world by such splendid-sounding concerns as "the Grand Dragon Universal Sales Company, the Ever-Rich Industrial Company, or the perhaps unfortunately named Flying Junk Industrial Company Ltd."

The book has only two shortcomings. One is the fact that most parts of the book have been written in 1987, and only minor revisions were added in 1997, just before Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region of China. To understand today's Hong Kong, the epilogue to an empire ought to be appended by a prologue to an uncertain future. The other shortcoming is the effect of Ms. Morris's expatriate perspective on Hong Kong. Her point of view omits many aspects that shape the life of the Chinese who have always been the majority of the city's inhabitants. There is still some truth in William Somerset Maugham's observation in the 1920s: the vast majority of foreign residents has not the slightest notion what is happening among the Chinese masses. Yet, in defense of Ms. Morris I want to state that she writes about what she knows best - and that is a writer's job.

Currently Ms. Morris's book is the best work about the vibrant, greedy, contradictory, and ultimately inscrutable city of Hong Kong, a place where it seems that only the temporary is permanent (except for the constant, ubiquitous noise of jack-hammers maybe), nothing is rooted and everyone is trying to move on. There is no simple denominator for this city and its inhabitants.

Having lived in Hong Kong for half a year, I can recommend Jan Morris's book as an entertaining introduction to the history and character of this fascinating city. I have enjoyed her Western perspective and her sense of humor as evidenced in her illustration why the Hong Kong Chinese are opportunists of genius: "When communal lavatories were first installed in Hong Kong, Chinese entrepreneurs took to sitting on them for so long that people were obliged to bribe them to come off."

When I read this book (which was originally published in German in 1979) for the first time in the early eighties, it completely swept me off my feet. Here was an analysis that explained why I was in search of my 'true self', why I felt my achievements were 'empty', why I felt empathy for others and antipathy for myself. The idea proposed by Alice Miller, in a nutshell, was that there are children who are able to feel and ease the emotional insecurity of their mothers (the 'gift' of the title), thus gain her love but in the process deny their own desires. These children grow up to become helpers in various roles, including therapists - like Alice Miller herself. They develop sensors for the subconscious signals of the needs of others. The problem is, they subconsciously deny themselves the pursuit of their own needs, and consequently cannot become who they 'are'. Which makes them prone to the illnesses which, according to the Freudian theory, go with suppressed desires ¡V depression and grandiosity (the latter being just a way of keeping depression at bay).

Alice Miller¡s ideas are based on her experiences as a psychotherapist who practiced for 20 years, and her own self-analysis. Her reasoning draws on some basic Freudian ideas: if the subconscious is brought to consciousness, the illnesses caused by the suppression can eventually be contained; the life of a person is rooted in her childhood and childhood experiences shape who a person 'is'. In the last part of her book she adds a theory derived from her work experience: when children whose needs have been denied in their childhood grow up and have children of their own, they can 'get rid' of their pain by inflicting the pain on their own children. She calls it the vicious circle of disdain, and the handing down of destructive attitudes from one generation to the next like a chain reaction.

How do I see 'The Drama of the Gifted Child' almost 20 years after reading it for the first time? I continue to be convinced that the general argument is true. Alice Miller captures very well the emotional consequences of denying one¡s own desires in the service of a person whose love is so overpoweringly important that it demands the sacrifice of one¡s 'true' self. Hermann Hesse¡s life and works provide her with excellent examples to illustrate this, by the way. On some cornerstones of her argument, however, I have my doubts now. Firstly, the idea of a 'true self', chiseled in stone if you so want, does not sit very well with me any more. Secondly, her thesis completely omits the role of fathers (quite un-Freudian, by the way), and what I saw as a refreshingly new point of view 20 years ago, looks like a major shortcoming to me now. Thirdly, having read up on some developmental psychology, I do not believe any longer that early experience inexorably shapes our lives. Finally, I think humans are so complex that there can not be a simple mechanism such as a handing down of certain attitudes: there are just too many exceptions from the rule.

'The Drama of the Gifted Child' is a powerful book and it is worth reading even after 20 years. It is not a scientific book in the sense that it contains testable findings, it presents a practitioner¡s conclusions gained from personal experience. You may call it an informed speculation, or an interim report from 'the search for the true self' as it is subtitled.

then the world will be well ordered, is what Confucius thought. This idea was so dear to his heart that he said the first thing he'd do if he were to rule a state was the rectification of words: "Let the ruler be ruler, the minister minister, the father father, and the son son".

Mr. Roget surely did not think the influence of his work would go that far. But his thesaurus, available now in the second edition of "Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus", is a very useful tool nevertheless. On over 950 pages it lists 20,000 words from ABACK (meaning "taken unawares", which is what I was when I found this treasure in the Shanghai Foreign Languages Bookstore for the equivalent of just 3 US Dollars) to ZOOM (meaning "move very quickly", which is absolutely not recommended when indulging in this book). As a decent thesaurus should do, the Roget gives you a 'meaning cluster' for every listed word. In addition, for every listed word there is a reference to the unique Concept Index at the end of the book. The Concept Index is an extension of the original idea of a thesaurus, which basically groups words according to idea. That is, the thesaurus leads you from a single word to a group of related synonyms. The Concept Index, on the other hand, shows you the semantic ocean in which the word floats. Or, to quote the editors: "The Concept Index not only helps writers to organize their ideas but leads them from those very ideas to the words that can best express them." (remember: "the rectification of words"). How does that work? The Concept Index is grouped in ten categories. One of my favorites is called "Fields of Human Activity". Under this category one finds the sub-category 'communicative', for example, which contains all the useful words for book reviews from 'abusive' to 'zany'.

If you love words, this is your book. If you want to have fun with words, this is your book, too: where else would you learn that the idea of a BUSINESSPERSON (concept no. 348, for those who want to look it up) contains not only the banker but also the cyberpunk?

"Norwegian Wood" is the novel which catapulted Haruki Murakami to national fame in Japan. The two volumes of the original edition - one in red, the other in green - were an essential must-have accessory of Japanese teenage girls. They took whichever volume fitted best with their dresses along to school. The appeal to female readership is no accident. "Norwegian Wood" is essentially a love story where a young undergraduate college student, the narrator of the novel, has to choose between two girls. Both girls are scarred, though in different degrees, by tragic events, and both experience the emotional helter-skelter of adolescence. They feel confused, sad, lost, alienated, helpless, bored, angry, empty, out-of synch, and most of all, they are trying to make sense of it all.

What makes this novel special is the compassionate distance of Toru Watanabe, the narrator. Murakami has a unique talent of depicting emotions in a restrained manner which brings out the humane core in the often odd and unusual behavior of his characters. And he does not intrude upon the "world" of his protagonist: implausible and invented as it is, the story appears realistic and coherent. Murakami, unlike other Japanese authors, likes to include Western culture in his works. One example of this is his use of Western novels in the construction of "Norwegian Wood". Toru Watanabe, the narrator, is modeled in many ways on Jerome D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye", his college friend Nagasawa resembles the "Great Gatsby", and part of the novel is set in a sanatorium which hints at Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain".

If you want to get a feel of the original edition, you may want to buy the paperback version published in Great Britain from amazon.co.uk which comes in two small volumes (red/green) in a box. Unfortunately, the books were printed in China and the binding seems to be of poor quality: the first 30 pages of volume one came loose from the spine when I read the book.

Haruki Murakami is one of the most interesting authors I have read this year, and "Norwegian Wood" gives only a limited impression of his abilities. For a more comprehensive experience, which I do recommend, I suggest his collection of short stories "The Elephant Vanishes".

In 30 short anecdotes, Mark Salzman gives a compassionate and humorous account of teaching English and studying martial arts in Changsha, a provincial capital in central China shortly after the opening of the country in the early 1980s. Changsha has the reputation that "there is nothing to do, nothing to buy, the people have no manners, the food is terrible and their dialect sounds awful" - so the book might have become very different from what it is: insightful, very funny, and full of respect for the often strange customs of traditional Chinese culture. In the best manner of innocents abroad, Mark Salzman knows how to make fun of his blunders in a very charming way. He conveys his sense of wonder beautifully, and does not pass judgment on anything he witnesses. Unlike many other authors who write about China, he is able to appreciate traditional Chinese forms of expression and self-mastery like martial arts (wushu) and calligraphy on their own terms. In his anecdotes he catches the essence of these arts: dedication, commitment, respect. "No matter what the quality of brush or paper," explains his calligraphy teacher, "one should always treat them as if they were priceless."

What Mark Salzman wrote about China some 15 years ago is not dated in many ways. Strange ideas are still being trumpeted as truths, and bureaucrats still like to harass foreigners (although humiliating unwitting foreigners is not "something of a popular sport in China" anymore; today it may even happen that a young female police officer at a police station first lectures you for half an hour on a minor transgression, but asks you out for a date right after she is finished).

Mark Salzman has a wonderful, gentle humor, and an admirable open-mindedness. He combines both to focus not on the ignorance of the people he meets, but on the insight which even ignorance can produce. There is no doubt that one little Chinese boy has no idea about the real Hong Kong, but being asked what he knew about this city, he answers "It's a big department store, isn't it?" Finally, let me say that I have never heard or read of a more charming and polite way of telling a Westerner that he has a big nose than in Mark Salzman's gem of a book: "You have a very three-dimensional face."