De Jong offers a fascinating chronicle based on the detailed diary of Netty Herman, her courageous Dutch mother, who records the horrors and desperation of life with her two young daughters, in World War II Japanese concentration camps for women and children on Java. This text includes the inspiring story of de Jong's journey from a childhood in captivity in Southeast Asia in the 1940s to peace and prosperity in the United States in the 21st century.
A moving portrait of Africa from Poland's most celebrated foreign correspondent - a masterpiece from a modern master. Famous for being in the wrong places at just the right times, Ryszard Kapuscinski arrived in Africa in 1957, at the beginning of the end of colonial rule - the "sometimes dramatic and painful, sometimes enjoyable and jubilant" rebirth of a continent. The Shadow of the Sun sums up the author's experiences ("the record of a 40-year marriage") in this place that became the central obsession of his remarkable career. From the hopeful years of independence through the bloody disintegration of places like Nigeria, Rwanda and Angola, Kapuscinski recounts great social and political changes through the prism of the ordinary African. He examines the rough-and-ready physical world and identifies the true geography of Africa: a little-understood spiritual universe, an African way of being. He looks also at Africa in the wake of two epoch-making changes: the arrival of AIDS and the definitive departure of the white man. Kapuscinski's rare humanity invests his subjects with a grandeur and a dignity unmatched by any other writer on the Third World, and his unique ability to discern the universal in the particular has never been more powerfully displayed than in this work.
Hatchet in North Korea: A sister and brother go on the run with explosive forbidden photographs in this gripping and timely survival adventure. North Korea is known as the most repressive country on Earth, with a dictatorial leader, a starving population, and harsh punishment for rebellion.Not the best place for a family vacation.Yet that's exactly where Mia Andrews finds herself, on a tour with her aid-worker father and fractious older brother, Simon. Mia was adopted from South Korea as a baby, and the trip raises tough questions about where she really belongs. Then her dad is arrested for spying, just as forbidden photographs of North Korean slave-labor camps fall into Mia's hands. The only way to save Dad: get the pictures out of the country. Thus Mia and Simon set off on a harrowing journey to the border, without food, money, or shelter, in a land where anyone who sees them might turn them in, and getting caught could mean prison -- or worse.An exciting adventure that offers a rare glimpse into a compelling, complicated nation, In the Shadow of the Sun is an unforgettable novel of courage and survival.
Japan was a party to the Axis Alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. However, it ignored repeated German demands to harm the 40,000 Jews who found themselves under Japanese occupation during World War Two. This book attempts to answer why they behaved in a relatively humane fashion towards the Jews.
Over a millennium ago, Erna, a seismically active yet beautiful world was settled by colonists from far-distant Earth. But the seemingly habitable planet was fraught with perils no one could have foretold. The colonists found themselves caught in a desperate battle for survival against the fae, a terrifying natural force with the power to prey upon the human mind itself, drawing forth a person's worst nightmare images or most treasured dreams and indiscriminately giving them life. Twelve centuries after fate first stranded the colonists on Erna, mankind has achieved an uneasy stalemate, and human sorcerers manipulate the fae for their own profit, little realizing that demonic forces which feed upon such efforts are rapidly gaining in strength. Now, as the hordes of the dark fae multiply, four people—Priest, Adept, Apprentice, and Sorcerer—are about to be drawn inexorably together for a mission which will force them to confront an evil beyond their imagining, in a conflict which will put not only their own lives but the very fate of humankind in jeopardy.
Espionage and betrayal become part of one family’s struggle to survive in the sequel to the bestselling author’s The Far Side of the Sky. It’s 1943, and the Japanese war machine has swallowed up Shanghai, the once-thriving “Paris of the East,” upending life for its Chinese population, as well as the city’s thousands of American, British and officially stateless European residents. Newlyweds Dr. Franz Adler and his wife, Soon Yi (Sunny), struggle to keep the city’s only hospital for refugee Jews open, while Shanghai’s Allied citizens are interned in squalid camps outside the city. The Japanese force 20,000 Jewish refugees, including the Adlers, to relocate to a one-square-kilometre area in the slums of the city—the Shanghai Ghetto. For those trapped inside, heat, starvation and disease are constant threats. Sunny, a Shanghai native desperate to defend her lifelong home, is tempted into the dangerous embrace of the local Resistance movement, while a mysterious Chinese man brought critically wounded to the hospital may represent an even greater threat. Meanwhile, as the tide of the war begins turning in the rest of the world, the local Nazis maintain a persistent, menacing interest in Shanghai’s Jewish population. Rising Sun, Falling Shadow blends a rich portrait of a city under siege with medical drama, romance and intrigue, showing us both the heroism and the treachery that can result when ordinary people find themselves faced with extraordinary dangers.
Tracing South Korea's meteoric rise to powerful status in Asia, this study describes the historic political and economic changes occurring in the the small, divided Asian nation
