What's In A Chinese Character

John Shiren's review is great. I don't have much to add to that. However, I would like to point out that Isaac Liao's review is misleading if not completely incorrect. The book does talk about traditional characters, just not for every single character. As I pointed out in my comment to his post, it also does not talk about every single iteration of a character throughout history, because that is not the point of the book. The point of the book is to learn to read and write the characters, and learn a little bit about the history of the character. In this respect it hits the mark. It has helped me to make headway in learning and remember characters, and I would highly recommend it.

I am in the process of learning chinese and this is a fantastic book and tool to learn how to read it and write it. You can learn the basic radicals or roots of the most important or common words. Congratulations to the author for writing this gem and my thanks to the other 2 reviewers for helping me to find it!

I have been studying Mandarin Chinese for just over a year. I found this book to be a fascinating one. I read a borrowed copy and now just ordered my own. It might less interesting for someone who is not studying Chinese characters, but for those who want to learn to read, it is excellent.