Sunday, January 02, 2005

currently reading...

Currently I am reading Steal My Art: Memoirs of a 100 Year Old... which discusses T.T. Liang from the point of view of one of his students. I'm about half way through now and finding it to be an amazing read. Here's a man who achieved many of the ideals of a T'ai Chi exponent - including living to 102 years of age in good health.

It is an incredible insight into some of the big names in T'ai chi chuan. The book does well to get rid of the idea that a T'ai Chi master is necessarily like the wizened enlightened monks we often see on TV in the films, but rather real men who lived in what has been a most eventful and terrible century. The book is worth a read to anyone interested in the experiences of a man who lived through all the 1900s but mostly to those interested in some of the T'ai Chi history of the last century...