A former director of language at the China Institute in New York City, Ho has taught Chinese at various institutions in the US and is the author of three other Chinese language reference texts published by Hippocrene Books. Written with the English-speaking student of Chinese in mind, his text contains some 15,000 essential entries organized into Chinese-English and English-Chinese sections. The entries use simplified Chinese characters and internationally standard pinyin Romanization. Those in the Chinese-English section are organized alphabetically according to pinyin. The text also includes an index of Chinese characters sorted by number of strokes, to assist users in identifying unfamiliar characters. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)