Every Western business leader wants to know more about China in order to enjoy a greater chance of business success in China. They also need to understand how and why Chinese businesses are spreading throughout the world, particularly under the new 'One Belt, One Road' initiative. However, few seek advice from those who best know the answers - Chinese business people. In Unlocking the Emperor's Door, we utilize exclusive and unparalleled access to multi-billionaire Li Jinyuan and his multinational Tiens Group as a case study to show how it's done in the broader context of a fast-changing China and a complex world.
Guy Gavriel Kay, multiple award-winning author of The Fionavar Tapestry and Sailing to Sarantium, completes his magnificent tale of an alternate Byzantine world… In the golden city of Sarantium, a renowned mosaicist seeks to fill his artistic ambitions and his destiny high upon a dome intended to be the emperor’s enduring sanctuary and legacy. The beauty and solitude of Crispin's work cannot protect him from the dangerous intrigues of court and city, swirling with rumors of war and conspiracy, while otherworldly fires mysteriously flicker and disappear in the streets at night. The emperor is plotting a conquest of Crispin’s homeland to regain an empire. And with his fate entwined with that of his royal benefactor, Crispin’s loyalties come with a very high price. And another voyager has come to the imperial city: Rustem of Kerakek, a physician from an eastern desert kingdom, determined to find his own fate amid the shifting, treacherous currents of passion and violence that define Sarantium.
From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and The Swimmers, this commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese American incarceration camps that is both a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and a resonant lesson for our times. On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty incarceration camp in the Utah desert. In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today's headlines.
This “interesting and perceptive” memoir recalls the familial country house the author’s grandparents bought in 1923 (The Washington Post Book World). The only child of divorced parents, Penelope Lively was often sent to stay at her grandparents’ country house, Golsoncott. Long after the house was sold out of the family, she begins to piece together the lives of those she knew fifty years before. As her narrative shifts from room to room, object to object, Lively paints a moving portrait of an era of rapid change—and of a family that transformed with the times. Charting the course of the domestic tensions of class and community among her relatives, she brings to light the evidence of the horrors endured during the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust through accounts of the refugees who came to live with them. “An elegiac yet resolutely unsentimental book, the house becomes a Rosetta stone for the author’s familial memories and an unwitting index of social change” in this eloquent meditation on place and time, memory and history, and tribute to the meaning of home (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
Magic and mayhem abound in this fantasy adventure from the author of The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place. Young dairymaid Begonia has lost her cow Alfalfa. So she has set off on a search across the countryside even though she has nothing but a magical map to guide her. Along the way she meets a mother and baby, a woodcutter, a very dirty young man, and an eight-foot ostrich. Meanwhile, the emperor has gone missing from the royal palace in a most mysterious manner. Was it murder? Was it magic? It will take all of Begonia's wits to save the empire and get Alfalfa home safely.
A vivid narrative history of one of the founding civilizations of the modern world, the Byzantine empire, evocatively told through the lives of its ninety-two emperors. The Byzantine empire was one of the most successful states of the Middle Ages, ruling over a huge terrain straddling Europe and western Asia for eleven hundred years from the fourth to fifteenth centuries. This chronicle by Byzantine expert Kevin Lygo brings this majestic yet turbulent period to life through the lives of its emperors: the supreme military commander, the head of state, and God’s representative on Earth, no less. These rulers, who included famous figures such as Constantine the Great and Justinian I, a scattering of women, as well as ruthless usurpers, left their mark upon the modern world with the establishment of the Eastern Orthodox Christian faith, the creation of a visual template for Christian art, and the magnificent artistic achievements of Hagia Sophia and Mount Athos. Each illustrated biographical entry contributes to the story of how Byzantium shaped art, culture, religious beliefs, and justice systems, as well as the role this extraordinary empire played in halting repeated invasions, allowing the idea of “Europe” to flourish. Through this compelling history, Lygo paints vivid portraits of the entire Byzantine cast, with tales of petty revenge, religious devotion, sexual intrigue, and artistic brilliance. From soaring intellectuals to illiterate peasants, eunuchs, and despots, this is a humanizing portrayal of the individuals whose rule profoundly impacted the lives of millions.
"Naked Emperors" explains in sharp detail how the historic congressional election of 1994 utterly failed to live up to the promise of the Republican Revolution and its Contract for America--and what citizens can do to make government more accountable.
