Taiwan is a country richly documented in photography. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic, the Taiwan Fine Arts Museum in Taipei in May of 2011 launched a photography retrospective documenting the many facets of Taiwan through historical and contemporary photography. The extraordinary richness of the exhibition is documented in its […]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Literature' Category
WoWasis book review: Amy C. Liu’s ‘Taiwan A to Z: The Essential Cultural Guide’
Amy C. Liu’s Taiwan A to Z: The Essential Cultural Guide (2009, ISBN 978-957-97847-6-4)is the book we wish we here at WoWasis had read prior to visiting Taiwan. Amy C. Liu was born in Taiwan, but came to San Jose, CA when she was 13 years old. She attended high school in the U.S., got […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis ranks English bookstores in Taipei
Even though Taiwanese are voracious readers, most Taiwanese bookshops have little for westerners wanting to read in English. We’ve visited four bookstores in Taipei that offer — in varying degrees, books for western readers. Here at WoWasis, our focus is on bookstores that offer books in English on Taiwanese culture and history. Navigating these stores […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘Dragon Lady’ by Sterling Seagrave
China’s Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi (1835-1908) was truly the stuff of legend, but as veteran Asian historian Sterling Seagrave (along with co-researcher Peggy Seagrave) points out, most of the legend was false. In Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China (1992, ISBN 0-679-40230-6), the author debunks the myths that unfairly […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Guidebook for Taiwan by National Geographic
Whenever we’re in a foreign country, we here at WoWasis always travel with a guidebook: they’re easier to use and markup than online guides, and we always end up running across stuff by accident that we wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. Our local bookshop only carried one guidebook for Taiwan, and that’s how we acquired (and […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis sex book review: Lujo Bassermann’s ‘History of Prostitution’
We here at WoWasis were skeptical at first: would this be just another titillating tome, or would there be real substance here? We were thrilled, because Lujo Bassermann’s The Oldest Profession: A History of Prostitution (1967, ISBN 0-88029-248-2) is scholarly, well-written, and readable. And it’s not a history of prostitution so much as it is […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Leon Wolff’s ‘Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippines’
There are two very good reasons Leon Wolff won the Parkman Prize for history literature for his landmark book Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century’s Turn (1960, ISBN 1-58288-209-6). First of all, it’s a compelling book. And second, there remains a dearth of literature pertaining […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Ted Jordan Meredith’s Pocket Guide to Bamboos
Here at WoWasis, we have quite a bit of bamboo planted in our immediate environs. And frankly, we’ve been wrestling a lot with the variety known as Bambusa oldhamii, also known as Oldham’s Bamboo. The problem with this variety is that it weeps an acidic liquid that etches car windows and paint and is not […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis travel gear review: a suppository escape kit you can’t be without
There are suppository escape kits and suppository escape kits. Here at the WoWasis Spycraft store, we’ve sold out of our complete supply of this item, and are looking for new suppliers (see below). Our little escape gizmo is essentially a “get out of jail free” card that was perfected by the French resistance during World War […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘Ying Yang: The Chinese Way of Love’ by Charles Humana
Upon reading Charles Humana and Wang Wu’s The Ying Yang: The Chinese Way of Love (1971, SBN 85523 019 3), it’s pretty apparent that the Chinese have been studying the art of love-making for a long, long time. This fascinating book isn’t merely about sex positions, either. Here at WoWasis, we were transfixed and mortified […]
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