"This is quintessential Merton."--The Catholic Review.

A tour of the Far East, narrated by the world's preeminent mythologist

In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories, artifacts, and gossip—Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century. First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former "International Settlement." Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai's labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city's population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.

A previously unpublished sequel to Baksheesh and Brahman reports on the author's travels through east Asia and his five-month stay in Japan in the 1950s, during which he experienced local culture and witnessed the area's struggles with Cold War tensions and western values. 20,000 first printing.

Beyond the Book is the first book dedicated to studies of rare East Asian materials collected by individuals and institutions in North America. It sheds new light on the two centuries of cultural exchanges between East Asia and North America and provides fresh clues for East Asian studies scholars in their hunt for raw research materials.

A diary recording the authors' extended tour of the Far East. It focuses on their impressions as the ancient civilizations of Japan, China and India, each in their separate ways, came to terms with the modern world.

"This is quintessential Merton."—The Catholic Review. "The moment of takeoff was ecstatic...joy. We left the ground—I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way after years of waiting and wondering..." With these words, dated October 15. 1968, the late Father Thomas Merton recorded the beginning of his fateful journey to the Orient. His travels led him from Bangkok, through India to Ceylon, and back again to Bangkok for his scheduled talk at a conference of Asian monastic orders. There he unequivocally reaffirmed his Christian vocation. His last journal entry was made on December 8, 1968, two days before his untimely, accidental death. Amply illustrated with photographs he himself took along the way and fully indexed, the book also contains a glossary of Asian religious terms, a preface by the Indian scholar Amiya Chakravarty, a foreword and postscript by Brother Patrick Hart of the Abbey of Gethsemani, as well as several appendices, among them the text of Merton's final address.