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First published in 1987 and now considered a classic, The Recording Angel charts the ways in which the phonograph and its cousins have transformed our culture. In a new Afterword, Evan Eisenberg shows how digital technology, file trading, and other recent developments are accelerating-or reversing-these trends. Influential and provocative, The Recording Angel is required reading for anyone who cares about the effect recording has had-and will have-on our experience of music

This article focuses on the commitment to truth seeking in two disparate cultural traditions. Striving for truth is not exclusive to Chinese and Jewish peoples. It is also amply evident in the writings of intellectuals who survived dogmatism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It fuels the passions and the trauma of the "Truth Commissions" that have proliferated from South Africa to Guatemala, East Timor, and Morocco. By exploring specific historical moments and linguistic expression for conveying the quest for authenticity in Chinese and Hebrew, this work draws attention to a broader historical phenomenon: Confucian sages and Jewish prophets who argued for truthfulness in times filled with deceit and injustice bequeathed posterity a vocabulary and a vision that endures today. Historians reckoning with that language and vision need to cast the net of their reflections beyond one culture, one thinker, one moment in time. Laying disparate traditions alongside one another, the author argues, illuminates the central theme of truthfulness in a more compelling fashion.

We are living in a period of maturation for scholarship on China by Chinese intellectuals writing in English. This is cause for celebration indeed. Zhidong Hao's book is part of this process. It offers a wide variety of readers a unique perspective upon the lives and dilemmas of China's intelligentsia today. This is at once an 'internal' perspective – skilfully, imaginatively culled from sources in Chinese, as well as an 'external' highly theoretical interpretation of the evolution of Chinese intellectual life in keeping with the latest literature in the sociology of knowledge.Writing about Chinese intellectuals is always difficult – partly because of the convolutions of political censorship that have constrained self expression in the People's Republic and partly because there is a long-standing tradition of mutual contempt in Chinese scholarship about owners of socially contested knowledge. Wenren xiang qing ("literati belittle one another") was the curse of Confucian elites. Today's China is not much better off, although Party control muffles intra-intellectual debates. Zhidong Hao avoids this tradition of contempt by taking seriously what intellectuals themselves have to say about their own experiences in China, how they see their predicament, opportunities and future.