eliassen john (6 risultati)

Paperback. Condizione: Good. No Jacket. Former library book; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.

Paperback. Condizione: Good. No Jacket. Missing dust jacket; Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.

Paperback. Condizione: Fair. No Jacket. Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.

1 volume in-8, 256 pp., black cloth hardback with a red dragon pattern on the cover, flat spine, one Chinese stamp on the title page, minor tears on the spine, clean pages, very good condition.

Condizione: Gut. Zustand: Gut | Seiten: 696 | Sprache: Englisch | Produktart: Bücher | Keine Beschreibung verfügbar.

Hardcover. Condizione: Very Good. Condizione sovraccoperta: Very Good. 1st Edition. 1stUSedn of 1955 London edn; 8vo black cloth hardback with a red dragon pattern on the cover, red titles to spine, uncliptdj, one Chinese stamp on the title page, slt foxing to eps ow VG/vgdj: 256pp, map, bw photo illus; Sigurd Eliassen, a Norwegian engineer, was assigned the task of irrigating Shaanxi just prior to World War II. This is a chatty account of his relationships with the local people during the four years it took to complete./NYT review By John J. Espey Nov. 3, 1957;ABOUT twenty-five years ago Sigurd Eliassen, an American - educated Norwegian engineer, was sent by the International Relief Organization to the Province of Shensi to dam the Ching River in an area that suffered periodically from famine because of insufficient water. According to legend, the Ching had once before been dammed, in the reign of the Emperor Ch'in Shih Huang, and the Chinese engineers had tried to bring the water not only to the plains but to the higher Yuan Shang plateau north of the river. Mr. Eliassen's task was to construct a dam and an irrigation canal on the lower level, roughly paralleling the old Imperial canal, and at the same time not antagonize the farmers living on the plateau, to whom he could promise nothing at least until he had studied the problems of building a higher dam farther up the gorge of the Ching. After he saw the floods of the Ching in a rainy season Mr. Eliassen realized that the larger dam would never be practical, but he brought to completion the lower dam and irrigation project. He was not successful, however, in keeping the peace with the plateau-dwellers, and one among them in particular became his personal enemy. Though Mr. Eliassen had no proof at first that this man definitely stood in his way the accidents and coincidences piled up. Some time later, when Mr. Eliassen returned to the district, he was captured and held for ransom by bandits, this time clearly under the leadership of his old enemy. The latter part of his book recounts his adventures during his captivity, the fate of the five government spies sent out to gather information about him and his eventual escape.Mr. Eliassen writes more or less as an amateur novelist, using his associates as characters in a somewhat complicated plot. The most enigmatic of these is Mrs, Miao, an attractive middle-aged woman who is a power among the villagers on the plateau. It is her oldest son who is Mr. Eliassen's antagonist but at the same time her two younger sons work for him, and one of them is actually his personal attendant. Other individuals include a Miss Olsen of the Scandinavian Alliance Mission; Malik, Mr. Eliassen's inexhaustible White Russian mechanic and chauffeur; Chuan, his grasping Chinese assistant, and a gallery of local government functionaries. As an engineer, Mr. Eliassen has an eye for the contours of the land; but more than this, he also responds to its atmosphere, and he includes a set-piece on his pilgrimage to Hua Shan, one of the five sacred mountains of China.THE period is that of the modern war lords, who were hesitant either to strike out for themselves or to throw in with Chiang Kai-shek's new regime, and Mr. Eliassen gives a good account of the shifts of authority, the abrupt reverses of the local civil wars and the entire problem of undertaking reconstruction work in the China of that day-and probably of this. His relations with his underlings, his efforts to see that money was not wasted and his dealings with the villagers are all detailed. Although one feels that he never penetrates very far beneath the surface, as he proceeds he does quite casually build up a picture of the old and new Chinas, of the conflicts and stresses in the land, And by occasional references to the old imperial legend and the fate of the Ching's first engineers, he succeeds in suggesting, without ever blatantly stating the fact, that twentieth-century China still faces the problems that follow upon the decay of a great empire.