Title: China's New Culture of Cool

Understanding the World's Fastest-Growing Market

 

Author: Christopher Ireland, Cynthia Chan, LiAnne Yu

Host: Clyde Warden

With a reported ethnographic emphasis, I really could not wait to get my hands on this book. But it was hard to find and the ebook price was too steep. In the end, interlibrary loan paid off and the book came through, but my expectations were not met.

Trying to be everything for everyone, this book is shallow and banal. It is full of typos and other errors that should have been caught by an editor. The group authorship shows through, as if each person threw in their bits and the photos are never very meaningful and rarely even match the text very well. Worst of all, for me, is the overriding modernity paradigm the authors/researchers are working from. There is little here in the way of meaningful insight, but rather all surface and shallow self reporting from young people who have an image they want to present.

The Show:

Length: 21 minutes 00 seconds. Download MP3 9.8MB (Right click->Save As).