This collaborative exploration by researchers in China and the United States spans theoretical, experimental, pedagogical, and ethnographic perspectives. The book thus offers learning opportunities to a range of audiences—reading researchers who want a better understanding of the structure of Chinese writing and the cognitive processes it appears to shape, students who wish to study how one-fifth of the world population reads, educators interested in comparative education, and all those with interdisciplinary curiosity about this nonalphabetic script, evolved from ancient times.

Are there specialized cognitive processes in reading Chinese? What units of “intraword analysis” guide first- and fourth-grade learners struggling with the characters of Chinese, ask several authors? How might this affect second language (L2) readers (Koda)? Do readers connect characters to the sounds of the language (often termed “phonological recoding”) as do readers of alphabetic systems? What are traditional teaching methods for Chinese characters? How do teachers adapt approaches from the West, such as “shared-book reading” (Anderson, Gaffney, Wu, Wang, Li, Shu, Nagy, & Ming)? Can children benefit from deeper morphological analysis (Wu, Anderson, Li, Chen, & Meng)?

Some things are missing, however. There is almost no attention to dialect variation and its possible effects on beginning reading, despite Tzeng's view: “We cannot understand a writing system without considering the spoken language it attempts to transcribe” (p. 5). There is no consideration given to the fact that mainland China has simplified its characters, whereas Taiwan has retained the more complex traditional system that requires more pen strokes (hard on writers, perhaps helpful to readers). Furthermore, Scribner and Cole's (1981) seminal work on specific cognitive effects of writing-system practice is not even referenced by any of the authors.

Nevertheless, with its numerous analyses of the Chinese writing system and exquisitely clear printing of characters, this cross-cultural collection has much to teach us all. The simply worded preface, the abstracts preceding each chapter, the synthesis chapters concluding each of four sections of the book, and the subject and author indexes provide easy access for readers with specific interests.