Eric Chen is ready to make a name for himself. American-born Chinese (ABC) and armed with a high-powered banking job, he is destined for success and riches in the world's next superpower. But the New China is rapidly changing, its billion-plus people ambitious, hungry and on the move. Determined to win a take-over deal that sees him shuttle between Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and New York, Eric encounters those also profiting from the world's most promising nation: the playboy son of a Hong Kong tycoon, a hedonistic boss, and another ABC desiring to belong. In the New China, cultural assimilation and confusion, along with temptation and seduction, abound- and Eric could lose himself not to mention those he loves most.
"Bradley is sharp and rueful, and a voice for a more seasoned, constructive vision of our international relations with East Asia." --Christian Science Monitor James Bradley introduces us to the prominent Americans--including FDR's grandfather, Warren Delano--who in the 1800s made their fortunes in the China opium trade. Meanwhile, American missionaries sought a myth: noble Chinese peasants eager to Westernize. The media propagated this mirage, and FDR believed that supporting Chiang Kai-shek would make China America's best friend in Asia. But Chiang was on his way out and when Mao Zedong instead came to power, Americans were shocked, wondering how we had "lost China." From the 1850s to the origins of the Vietnam War, Bradley reveals how American misconceptions about China have distorted our policies and led to the avoidable deaths of millions. The China Mirage dynamically explores the troubled history that still defines U.S.-Chinese relations today.
In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman ("Elegant and scrupulous"—New York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa ("A mesmerizing page-turner"—Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically advanced country. No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student, with whom he began a lifelong affair. He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded the ever-enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest frontiers of this ancient empire. He searched everywhere for evidence to bolster his conviction that the Chinese were responsible for hundreds of mankind's most familiar innovations—including printing, the compass, explosives, suspension bridges, even toilet paper—often centuries before the rest of the world. His thrilling and dangerous journeys, vividly recreated by Winchester, took him across war-torn China to far-flung outposts, consolidating his deep admiration for the Chinese people. After the war, Needham was determined to tell the world what he had discovered, and began writing his majestic Science and Civilisation in China, describing the country's long and astonishing history of invention and technology. By the time he died, he had produced, essentially single-handedly, seventeen immense volumes, marking him as the greatest one-man encyclopedist ever. Both epic and intimate, The Man Who Loved China tells the sweeping story of China through Needham's remarkable life. Here is an unforgettable tale of what makes men, nations, and, indeed, mankind itself great—related by one of the world's inimitable storytellers.
"A long-awaited memoir by the celebrated physicist whose clashes with the Chinese regime helped inspired the Tiananmen Square protests describes how in spite of his scientific contributions he was sentenced to hard labor for decades and eventually sought asylum from the U.S., "--NoveList.
*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography* *Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography* *Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize* "Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it."--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself."--David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.
This heart-wrenching story immerses readers in the dramatic survival of one outspoken man who illuminates the souls of a billion ordinary Chinese citizens. An Wei—a stubborn, hardworking peasant who has lived by his values and stood up for his convictions—has succeeded against all odds in the authoritarian environment of China. Despite grinding poverty, hunger, reeducation campaigns, and attacks from jealous peers, An Wei continues to inspire with his daring achievements, such as launching a democratic congress in his own village. His compelling life provides a vivid backdrop for understanding the development of modern China from the unique perspective of an outspoken citizen. Through his audacious determination and survival skills forged in rural poverty, An Wei’s unstoppable drive to improve himself and rural China will captivate and enthrall readers. Her website can be found at https://nancypine.info/
A sharply observed, hilarious account of Troost's adventures in China- a complex, fascinating country with enough dangers and delicacies to keep him, and readers, endlessly entertained.
More than any other modern man, Hudson Taylor is the pattern by which the missionary is measured. Few who read this account of how Hudson Taylor learned to trust God first for a half crown and eventually for one thousand new missionaries can remain content with the current state of their own faith. "Hudson Taylor is not remembered today as the strategist who almost singlehandedly brought about a revolutionary change in the missionary situation in China one hundred years ago, but rather as a man of God. What abide are the fragrance and influence of his life." So wrote Arthur Glasser, former home director for the USA and Canada of the Overseas Missionary Fellowship. - Back cover.
In the 1920s an international team of scientists and miners unearthed the richest evidence of human evolution the world had ever seen: Peking Man. After the communist revolution of 1949, Peking Man became a prominent figure in the movement to bring science to the people. In a new state with twin goals of crushing “superstition” and establishing a socialist society, the story of human evolution was the first lesson in Marxist philosophy offered to the masses. At the same time, even Mao’s populist commitment to mass participation in science failed to account for the power of popular culture—represented most strikingly in legends about the Bigfoot-like Wild Man—to reshape ideas about human nature. The People’s Peking Man is a skilled social history of twentieth-century Chinese paleoanthropology and a compelling cultural—and at times comparative—history of assumptions and debates about what it means to be human. By focusing on issues that push against the boundaries of science and politics, The People’s Peking Man offers an innovative approach to modern Chinese history and the history of science.
From the dean of Scandinavian noir, Henning Mankell, the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series, an incredible stand-alone masterpiece: a bone-chilling mystery that spans two centuries and four continents. In the far north of Sweden a small, quiet village has been almost entirely wiped out by a mass murderer. The only clue left at the scene is a red ribbon. Among the victims are the grandparents of Judge Birgitta Roslin, who sets out to find the killer. Despite being brushed off by the police, Birgitta is determined to prove that the murders were not a random act of violence but are part of something far more dark and complex. Her investigation leads to the highest echelons of power and into the recesses of history where the seeds of evil deeds were planted.
