review:Stories behind Chinese Poems

[Silent]

From the free give-away 2nd round this is my review of Stories behind Chinese Poems

The book is strong and made from good quality paper with clear printed characters. The book has 124 stories mostly around 1 page in length. The stories contain a few lines of poetry with some explanation/back ground info on the poetry. Every couple of pages there's a nice black and white drawing.

With regards to the stories I'm unfortunately unable to tell you much. They're way above my head. For a couple of stories I looked up all unknown words and characters, but still had a hard time figuring it out. Though my Chinese is not that good I think it's safe to say that the book is aimed at the (very) advanced student.
 

[maomao2014]

Most Chinese people only know one or two famous lines in one poem. For example in the third images 野火烧不尽，春风吹又生is the most famous line describing the fire cannot destroy the grass, which was widely used in slogans during sino-Japan war and China civil war time, because one of Mao Zedong's essay used 星星之火可以燎原 which is from this poem

[edelweis]

(sigh) I wish I could attend a class that used this as a textbook.

Well I guess I could get a private teacher if I really wanted to, but it looks quite above my level and also not terribly useful in my field, so it should not be my priority.

Still... but no I must resist the temptation to hoard even more books.