Richard Baum

This audacious and illuminating memoir by Richard Baum, a senior China scholar and sometime policy advisor, reflects on forty years of learning about and interacting with the People's Republic of China, from the height of Maoism during the author's UC Berkeley student days in the volatile 1960s through globalization. Anecdotes from Baum's professional life illustrate the alternately peculiar, frustrating, fascinating, and risky activity of China watching — the process by which outsiders gather and decipher official and unofficial information to figure out what's really going on behind China's veil of political secrecy and propaganda. Baum writes entertainingly, telling his narrative with witty stories about people, places, and eras. China Watcher will appeal to scholars and followers of international events who lived through the era of profound political and academic change described in the book, as well as to younger, post-Mao generations, who will enjoy its descriptions of the personalities and political forces that shaped the modern field of China studies.

This audacious and illuminating memoir by Richard Baum, a senior China scholar and sometime policy advisor, reflects on forty years of learning about and interacting with the People's Republic of China, from the height of Maoism during the author's UC Berkeley student days in the volatile 1960s through globalization. Anecdotes from Baum's professional life illustrate the alternately peculiar, frustrating, fascinating, and risky activity of China watching — the process by which outsiders gather and decipher official and unofficial information to figure out what's really going on behind China's veil of political secrecy and propaganda. Baum writes entertainingly, telling his narrative with witty stories about people, places, and eras. China Watcher will appeal to scholars and followers of international events who lived through the era of profound political and academic change described in the book, as well as to younger, post-Mao generations, who will enjoy its descriptions of the personalities and political forces that shaped the modern field of China studies.

For many centuries observers of the night sky interpreted the moving planets and the surrounding starry realms in terms of concentric crystalline spheres, in the center of which hung the Earth — the hub of creation. But with the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, astronomers were suddenly struck by a momentous truth: the solar system was neither small nor intimate, but extended an unfathomable distance toward countless even more distant stars. The endless possibilities of these astounding developments fired scientists' imaginations, leading both to further discoveries and to flights of fancy. While newly discovered facts are important and interesting, the quaint curiosities and spectral "ghosts" that led scientists astray have a fascination of their own. This is the subject of astronomer Richard Baum in this elegant narrative about the mysteries and wonders of celestial exploration. The fabled "mountains of Venus," a "city in the moon," ghostly rings around Uranus and Neptune, bright inexplicable objects seen near the sun, and the truth behind Coleridge's "Star dogged Moon" in his famous poem about the Ancient Mariner — these are just some of the intriguing twists and turns that astronomers took while investigating our starry neighbors. Baum vividly conveys the romance of astronomy at a time when the vistas of outer space were a new frontier and astronomers, guided only by imagination and analogy, set forth on uncharted seas and were haunted for a lifetime by marvels both seen and imagined.

Harold Hill’s lunar portfolio is a unique collection of drawings now published for the first time. Each illustration is supplemented with notes made at the time of observation. Astronomical drawing still has an important place alongside photography in the same way that photography has not supplanted the artist in the fields of botany and ornithology, for example. Indeed, since astronomical images tend to shimmer because of turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere, drawings constructed by an artist who takes advantage of the fleeting moments of perfect vision are often more detailed than photographs. No one can fail to be impressed by the beauty and artistry of this work and, to the initiated, the accuracy and attention to detail is remarkable. This is a book for astronomers, amateur and professional alike, and for those who would simply like to know more about the moon.

The intriguing narrative of one of astronomy's strangest searches for a planet that never existed.

For almost two decades after Mao Zedong's death, an epic, no-holds-barred contest was waged in China between orthodox Marxists and reformers. With Deng Xiaoping's strong support, the reformers ultimately won; but they--and China--paid a heavy price. Here, Richard Baum provides a lively, comprehensive guide to the intricate theater of post-Mao Chinese politics. He tells the intriguing story of an escalating intergenerational clash of ideas and values between the aging revolutionaries of the Maoist era and their younger, more pragmatic successors. Baum deftly analyzes the anatomy of the reformers' ultimate victory in his brilliant reconstruction of the twists and turns of the reform process.

The book series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie, founded by Gustav Grober in 1905, is among the most renowned publications in Romance Studies. It covers the entire field of Romance linguistics, including the national languages as well as the lesser studied Romance languages. The editors welcome submissions of high-quality monographs and collected volumes on all areas of linguistic research, on medieval literature and on textual criticism. The publication languages of the series are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian as well as German and English. Each collected volume should be as uniform as possible in its contents and in the choice of languages.