This imaginative and incisive collection of pieces about life in contemporary China reveals, like a series of snapshots, a picture of the lives of ordinary people and the rules and rituals that govern their daily existence. Key themes surface: in particular, the emergence of a consumer culture driven by the market, and the way in which this intersects with the "floating population" of vagrants, prostitutes and liumang (hooligans). We see how, in turn, the official strategies of the state deal with this perceived social disorder and how the street responds. Underlying much of the discussion of contestation and transformation is the notion of human rights. Street life is shown to be a creative, dynamic, dissenting, deviant and often compliant aspect of the economic, political and cultural face of China. Articles, written by Chinese scholars and journalists, as well as reports, official documents and interviews, all engaging and interesting in themselves, range from discussions of the work unit system to architecture, murder rates, acupuncture and Mao fetishes. Some of the pieces are quirky: we learn about the Chinese version of "Monopoly," translated as Entrepreneur, the Chinese Ethnic Culture theme park and the increasing popularity of tatoos, for example. Readers are guided through the book by extensive commentary written by Michael Dutton. There will be no better introduction to the discourses of contemporary China, and few more entertaining, vivid and stimulating accounts of shifts in cultural life and politics.

Learning how people, plants, and animals depend on each other is a lesson for everyone. Join Mr. Turtle for a guided tour that rambles from forests and grasslands to deserts, oceans, and wetlands. Thirty adventurous illustrations to color make the message clear: Take care of the planet It's our home

Learning how people, plants, and animals depend on each other is a lesson for everyone. Join Mr. Turtle for a guided tour that rambles from forests and grasslands to deserts, oceans, and wetlands. Thirty adventurous illustrations to color make the message clear: Take care of the planet It's our home Free Teacher's Manual available. Grades: PreK-K.

Boost: Seriously Fun Learning
Keeping children entertained and engaged is the key to learning, and the Boost series offers a wide range of fun-filled coloring and activity books that help teach a variety of basic skills. Each title is targeted to a specific grade range and carefully aligned with the Common Core State Standards, which are listed at the bottom of each page.

Where is the market? inquires the tourist one dark, chilly morning. Follow the ghosts, responds the taxi driver, indicating a shadowy parade of overloaded tricycles. It s not called the ghost market for nothing And indeed, Beijing is nothing if not haunted. Among the soaring skyscrapers, choking exhaust fumes, nonstop traffic jams, and towering monuments, one discovers old Beijing newly styled, perhaps, but no less present and powerful than in its ancient incarnation. "Beijing Time" conducts us into this mysterious world, at once familiar and yet alien to the outsider.

The ancient Chinese understood the world as enchanted, its shapes revealing the mythological order of the universe. In the structure and detail of Tian anmen Square, the authors reveal the city as a whole. In Beijing no pyramids stand as proud remnants of the past; instead, the entire city symbolizes a vibrant civilization. From Tian anmen Square, we proceed to the neighborhoods for a glimpse of local color from the granny and the young police officer to the rag picker and the flower vendor. Wandering from the avant-garde art market to the clock towers, from the Monumental Axis to Mao s Mausoleum, the book allows us to peer into the lives of Beijingers, the rules and rituals that govern their reality, and the mythologies that furnish their dreams. Deeply immersed in the culture, everyday and otherworldly, this anthropological tour, from ancient cosmology to Communist kitsch, allows us to see as never before how the people of Beijing and China work and live.

Beginning with the bloody communist purges of the Jiangxi era of the late 1920s and early 1930s and moving forward to the wild excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Policing Chinese Politics explores the question of revolutionary violence and the political passion that propels it. "Who are our enemies, who are our friends, that is a question germane to the revolution," wrote Mao Zedong in 1926. Michael Dutton shows just how powerful this one line was to become. It would establish the binary division of life in revolutionary China and lead to both passionate commitment and revolutionary excess. The political history of revolutionary China, he argues, is largely framed by the attempts of Mao and the Party to harness these passions. The economic reform period that followed Mao Zedong's rule contained a hint as to how the magic spell of political faith and commitment could be broken, but the cost of such disenchantment was considerable. This detailed, empirical tale of Chinese socialist policing is, therefore, more than simply a police story. It is a parable that offers a cogent analysis of Chinese politics generally while radically redrafting our understanding of what politics is all about. Breaking away from the traditional elite modes of political analysis that focus on personalities, factions, and betrayals, and from "rational" accounts of politics and government, Dutton provides a highly original understanding of the far-reaching consequences of acts of faith and commitment in the realm of politics.