ANNPING CHIN

A thoughtful and authoritative biography of Confuciousa philosopher whose ongoing relevance is unparalleled and who is just as current in China today as he was one thousand years ago.For more than two thousand years, Confucius has been an inseparable part of Chinas history. Yet despite this fame,Confucius the man has been elusive. Now, in The Authentic Confucius, Annping Chin has worked through the most reliable Chinese texts in her quest to sort out what is really known about Confucius from the reconstructions and the guesswork that muddled his memory. Chin skillfully illuminates the political and social climate in which Confucius lived. She explains how Confucius made the transition from court advisor to wanderer, and how he reluctantly became a professional teacher as he refined his judgment of human character and composed his vision of a moral political order. The result is an absorbing and original book that shows how Confucius lived and thought: his habits and inclinations, his relation to the people of the time, his work as a teacher and as a counselor, his worries about the world and the generations to come. In this book, Chin brings the historical Confucius within our reach, so that he can lead us into his idea of the moral and to his teachings on family and politics, culture and learning. The Authentic Confucius is a masterful account of the life and intellectual development of a thinker whose presence remains a powerful force today.

Four Sisters of Hofei is an intimate encounter with Chinese history, told through the collective memory and stories of four sisters born between 1908 and 1924, and with the benefit of the extraordinary knowledge of Yale historian Annping Chin.Now in their late eighties and early nineties, the Chang sisters lived through a century of historic change in China. In this extraordinary work, assembled with the benefit of letter, diaries, family histories, poetry, journals, and interviews, Annping Chin shapes the story of this family into a riveting chronicle that provides uncanny insight into the old China and its transition to the new.From their father, the Chang sister inherited reason and a belief in the virtues of modern education. From their mother they learned about the human spirit and the art of finding an appropriate path. Their nurse-nannies -- uneducated widows from the Hofei countryside -- contributed their own traditional beliefs and opinions on modern ways. As the sisters grew up, one broke with tradition to marry an actor, one survived the most violent political years of Communist rule, one married one of Chinas greatest novelists, and one, raised separately by her devout Buddhist great-aunt, was taught to be a rigorous practitioner of Chinas classical arts.The Chang sisters prolific correspondence provides a rare glimpse of private life in China during the twentieth century, as well as a chronicle of the country from prosperity to persecution, from foreign wars to Cultural Revolution. In Chins expert prose, Four Sisters of Hofei is an intensely person story that illustrates the complex history of a complex land.

Confucio (551 a. C. - 479 a. C.), creador del confucianismo y una de las figuras más influyentes de la historia china, dirigió todas sus fuerzas a vivir lo mejor que sabía. Su único deseo era que se le concediesen unos pocos años mas de vida. Asi, "si llego a los cincuenta", decia, "sere quiza capaz de comprender los principios del cambio y podre librarme de cometer errores graves".Biografia y libro de historia sobre China clasica, este libro viene a llenar un vacio en la bibliografia española ya que se encuentran pocos libros que aborden la vida y la obra de Confucio y la historia china desde los tiempo mas antiguos."Igual que Socrates y Jesucristo, Confucio concibio su pensamiento sobre la palabra hablada con todos los matices de la enigmatica sabiduria antigua. Annping Chin nos ayuda a recuperar esos matices como nadie lo ha hecho hasta ahora" (Harold Bloom).