This book is the result of a remarkable collaboration. Zhang Qicheng is an author well known in China for his teaching and publications on Chinese medicine and its philosophical underpinnings, guides to the discipline and pleasure of nurturing life, and using the concepts of cultural studies as well as traditional Sinological scholarship as an eminent academic. Judith Farquhar is an author well known in China studies and in both anthropology and cultural studies for her close observation of, and her training in, traditional Chinese medicine, and her finely tuned readings of magazines, manuals and stories on sexual and food appetites. Together, they observed and participated in life-nurturing exercises in the open spaces of west-central Beijing and with some graduate research assistants interviewed some of the regular practitioners.

Excerpts from transcripts of these interviews fill one of the four chapters of their book. The remaining chapters, after a long introduction, comprise a many-dimensioned description of the city and the historical context of contemporary life-nurturing exercises, a reading of the popular books available on doing these exercises, and an exposition, with many quotations, of one such popular book by Zhang Qicheng himself.

This is a truly co-authored book, in all the possible variations of being by two authors. They take turns to comment on the excerpts from the interviews; the conclusion is a discussion between them on their different intellectual formations and contexts for the writing of the book; the rest, including the exposition of Zhang's popular book on the meaning of “life,” is joint in the sense that passages might have a recognizable slant from one or the other but they have agreed on a common text. This is invigorating and felicitous. It is easy to follow, making an attractive case, even though the book can be read in several ways. It is a manual on the appropriate approach to doing life-nurturing activities, even though it is not an instruction manual. The activities that nurture life are too many and various. It is a work on the philosophical underpinnings of the common sense (their words) of the practice and the way practitioners speak of it as a balancing act of moderation amid the frictions of contemporary Beijing. It is an ethnography of the practice and its practitioners. It is a well-backed argument about the embodiment, multiplicity, and multi-sensate experience of self-fashioning conduct based in, but not confined to, traditional Chinese medicine and its classical texts, in which the practitioners are and see themselves as contributors to the public good in contemporary China.

My wish as an anthropologist is that it had been more ethnographic, with more rounded portraits of the practitioners, to know more about their home lives, and to have included practitioners that were not, as it appears the interviewees all were, working in or volunteers attached to their local residents' committees. Did they and would others have had recourse to forms of divination about their health or their children and grandchildren? Would some of the formation dancers of the modernized traditional New Year dance, the yangge, have taken part in the annual festival of the temple on Miaofeng mountain, outside Beijing, or gone to the Temple of the Eastern Peak in Beijing, or to a Dragon God temple, which would be an easy transition from the image of a host of dragons with no leader that so tellingly ends the introduction? Maybe Zhang Qicheng's own more philosophical inclinations or the residents' committee selective principles worked against such religious ritual extensions of the nurturing of life.