Timothy Brook's book, The Confusions of Pleasure: Trade and Culture in Ming China is a detailed account of the three centuries of the Ming Dynasty in China. The book provides an opportunity to visualize this important period in Chinese history. Confusions of Pleasure not only chronicles the economic development during the Ming Dynasty, but also the resulting cultural and social changes that transformed the nobility and the merchant class. Brook's insights highlight the gap between the idealized beliefs of the Ming Dynasty and the reality of its economic expansion and effects. Brook describes this gap through the use of numerous first-hand accounts from individuals of various social statuses. Traditionally, the Confucian model of society was organized with the nobility at the top and the merchant as a class at the bottom (Brook, p. 134).Examination system. This exact system is what allowed a man named Zhang Tao to gain a position within the nobility. Zhang Tao would become a mid-level bureaucrat during the later Ming period. Written only once, Zhang Tao is considered a minor figure in the history of the Ming Dynasty (Brook, p. 6). However, Brook uses Zhang Tao as hindsight for the nearly three centuries of dynasty that precede it. However, as a moralist, Zhang Tao romanticized the early Ming period. His commentary is collected from his writings in the Sheh County Gazetteer (Brook, p. 87). Borrowing this format from Zhang Tao, Brook uses the seasons to divide the various periods of the Ming dynasty. The first segment, Winter, archives the early years of the Ming dynasty between 1368 and 1450. The social hierarchy of the early Ming was based on land ownership (Brusco, p. 79). One way to describe the growing power... middle of paper... ok, p. 251). Brook also uses characters from various stories in Li Le's joint book, Miscellaneous Notes on Things Seen and Heard to contrast the melancholy memories of Zhang Tao and Gu Yanwu (Brook, p. 254). What Brook determines from Li Le's account is crucial: “…However completely trade has replaced paternalism and deference with wage relations, or however well some individuals have managed to leap over social barriers and climb the social ladder…the class system of lordship and deference that held the Chinese world together at the beginning of the Ming period was still there at the end” (Brook, p. 260). This ultimately leads to Brook's analysis: “Without trade networks, many nobles would not have survived the dynastic transition” (Brook, p. 262). This conclusion reveals the fundamental disparity between the ideology of the Ming nobility and reality.