A very personal look at the development of China from 1973 to 2013 - from Mao to Hu. The author was in the Advance Party that reestablished U.S. relations with China in May 1973 during the time of Mao and Zhou Enlai. His intimate connection to China over the next 40 years provides a unique perspective as he examines the history and culture of China, and especially the development of China since 1973. His journeys took him to China eighteen times covering every administrative area except Macao. This book covers China as they went from drab to ultra modern, from steam engines to super high speed trains, from famine to food exports. We look at religion, education, health care, and more. Finally, we take a close look at the most important historical landmarks in China. This is an autobiography, a history book, a travel book - a perfect read for anyone with an interest in China.
Philosophical wisdom and practical advice for overcoming the problems of middle age How can you reconcile yourself with the lives you will never lead, with possibilities foreclosed, and with nostalgia for lost youth? How can you accept the failings of the past, the sense of futility in the tasks that consume the present, and the prospect of death that blights the future? In this self-help book with a difference, Kieran Setiya confronts the inevitable challenges of adulthood and middle age, showing how philosophy can help you thrive. You will learn why missing out might be a good thing, how options are overrated, and when you should be glad you made a mistake. You will be introduced to philosophical consolations for mortality. And you will learn what it would mean to live in the present, how it could solve your midlife crisis, and why meditation helps. Ranging from Aristotle, Schopenhauer, and John Stuart Mill to Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as drawing on Setiya’s own experience, Midlife combines imaginative ideas, surprising insights, and practical advice. Writing with wisdom and wit, Setiya makes a wry but passionate case for philosophy as a guide to life.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Light in August" by William Faulkner. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of a character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution evoked in startling and magical poetry. Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own. Kincaid takes us from Xuela's childhood in a home where she could hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack Labatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela's is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is "the black room of the world" that is Xuela's barrenness and motherlessness.
Praise for 44 Days:What if Alexis de Tocqueville were fluent in Mandarin and traveling through China by backpack and bullet train? He would record every encounter and analyze China’s national character with remarkable lucidity. He would produce a book full of telling insights that functioned like a five-dimensional chess game. It would be a guide book, travel companion, memoir, political history, and plain-old-pleasure for someone who likes their prose with pith in it. Oklahoma’s latter-day Tocqueville, Jeff J. Brown, is one hell of a good story teller, and traveling with him deep into China is an adventure not to be missed. Thomas Bass, Author of The Spy Who Loved Us, Vietnamerica, Camping with the Prince, Reinventing the Future, and The Eudaemonic Pie. "44 Days" is a delightful romp through a changing China and Jeff Brown is an excellent guide.John Pomfret, author of Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China "44 Days" is a fascinating exploration of the people of China, and the land in which they live. Brown is very knowledgeable of China's government and the country's millennia-old history. He obviously enjoys not just his travels but the people he meets. While he journeys, we journey with him. Jeff Brown is an intelligent, articulate and entertaining writer and 44 Days is absolutely enthralling. I highly recommend it. Mick Winter, author of Cuba for the Misinformed: Facts from the Forbidden Island Much more than just a travelogue, 44 Days is an intimate dialogue with China’s peoples, their histories, regions, economies, cultures, work, foods and future. Unabashedly iconoclastic and a contrarian’s delight, Jeff brings down many a golden calf, as he writes as few travelers do - putting China’s relations and rapid arc of development in perspective with the United States and Europe, making 44 Days a fascinating and unique approach to today’s critically important world affairs. Traveling over 12,000km by train and bus, walking hundreds more, while climbing a few of those in vertical ascent, join Jeff as he reports from the ground up on the greatest socioeconomic transformation ever seen, 21st century China – our planet’s soon to be greatest superpower. How will Baba Beijing, China’s central government behave, while honoring its 2,200 year old Heavenly Mandate for 20% of the human race? After 500 years of being masters of the world, what will the great historical Industrial Age powers do in response - adapt or lash out? All of our standards of living and lifestyles, even our species’ survival, depend on these soon to be events. Funny, enlightening & with an eye for the right details, 44 Days provides unique perspectives to these new century issues. It will keep you amused and thinking, as Jeff takes you traveling in, across and over five wild and wooly Western China provinces, face to face with the local people. Includes 125+ photos, maps and charts. Read less
By the late 1930s, Europe sat on the brink of a world war. As the holocaust approached, many Jewish families in Germany fled to one of the only open port available to them: Shanghai. Once called "the armpit of the world," Shanghai ultimately served as the last resort for tens of thousands of Jews desperate to escape Hitler's "Final Solution." Against this backdrop, 11-year-old Ursula Bacon and her family made the difficult 8,000-mile voyage to Shanghai, with its promise of safety. But instead of a storybook China, they found overcrowded streets teeming with peddlers, beggars, opium dens, and prostitutes. Amid these abysmal conditions, Ursula learned of her own resourcefulness and found within herself the fierce determination to survive.
Is this the day I die? Li Quan asks himself this question daily, knowing that he might be killed for practicing his faith. American businessman Ben Fielding has no idea what his brilliant former college roommate is facing in China. He expects his old friend has fulfilled his dream of becoming a university professor. But when they are reunited in China after twenty years, both men are shocked at what they discover about each other. Thrown together in an hour of encroaching darkness, both must make choices that will determine not only the destinies of two men, but two families, two nations, and two worlds.
"An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level—political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous." —Newsweek "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius." —New York Times Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
This book introduces the major works and debates in Chinese children's literature within the framework of China's revolution and modernization. It demonstrates that the guiding rationale in children's literature was the political importance of children as the nation's future.
