A First Course in Electrical and Computer Engineering: With Matlab Programs and Experiments - Softcover

Scharf, Louis L.; Behrens, Richard T.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 020153472X ISBN 13: 9780201534726

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub, 1990

Synopsis

When Carsten Jensen set out by train from Denmark on a journey to the East, he expected to find lands of rich history and culture, and peopleundergoing radical change at the end of the twentieth century. In thisilluminating narrative of his travels, there is this and much, much more.Fusing social commentary and history with vibrant descriptions of people and places, Jensen brilliantly evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of these venerable civilizations. He examines the reverberations of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, always attuned to the restless air of expectancy in the country, but also finds time for remote concerts of ancient Chinese music. He renders the pervasive sense of destruction, despair, and loss in Cambodia with particular sensitivity, wondering at the specter of death that still hovers over the landscape. And it is in Vietnam, with its palpablelegacy of colonialism and war, that Jensen ultimately loses himself in an extraordinary love affa

About this title

About the Author

Born in 1952, Carsten Jensen made his name as a columnist and literary critic for the Copenhagen daily Politiken. During the 1990s he had several major press assignments around the world, including Yugoslavia and several cities in Asia. The author of six collections of essays and two novels, Jensen lives in Copenhagen.

From Publishers Weekly

That Danish journalist and essayist Jensen witnessed something momentous and formative on his journey through southeast Asia is clear, but the declarative force of his title belies the gradual, continuous nature of his discovery. Where and when did the beginning of the world make itself visible to this lonely traveler? On Nanjing Dong Lu, where brash consumerism explodes in pyrotechnics on the eve of the New Year, prompting Jensen to exclaim, "China is shedding its skin"? Or was it in Udang, the former capital of a kingdom now known as Cambodia, where amid the rubble of a wasted monastery he finds a grove of trees, carefully tended and labeled with Latin species names? Or in Vietnam, where erotic women have forgiven their past sorrows and whose "process of forgetting... was the sandpaper with which they refined an outlook on life"? In all these places and others, Jensen describes a near mystical experience in language so luminous one wonders whether to praise the author or the translator. Often, the headiness of his reactions threatens to discredit him he confesses that for him Asia represents a "dream." A very Western political view also compromises his analogies he views modern China almost exclusively through the lens of Tiananmen Square; Cambodians are uniformly asked about life before 1979, during the period of Pol Pot's nightmarish "geno-suicide"; and he thinks of Vietnam and war as inseparable, "as though that were the country's name." Still, Jensen's solemnity and spirituality distinguish him from most Western observers, as does his easy turn of anecdote into metaphor.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 020153472X
• ISBN 13: 9780201534726
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 269