Showing titles in Asia

When Ye Pei dreamed of Venice as a girl, she imagined a magical floating city of canals and gondola rides. And she imagined her mother, successful in her new life and eager to embrace the daughter she had never forgotten. But when Ye Pei arrives in Italy, she learns her mother works on a farm far from the city. Her only connection, a mean-spirited Chinese auntie, puts Ye Pei to work in a small-town café. Rather than giving up and returning to China, a determined Ye Pei takes on a grueling schedule.

A Brief History of Thailand offers an engaging look at the country's last 250 years - from coups and violent massacres to the invention of Pad Thai in the 1930s. Listeners will learn the vibrant story of Thailand's emergence as a prosperous Buddhist state, its transformation from traditional kingdom to democratic constitutional monarchy, and its subsequent rise to prominence in Southeast Asian affairs. Thailand's dramatic history spans centuries of conflict, and this book recounts many of these fascinating episodes

From 1632 until 1854, Japan’s rulers restricted contact with foreign countries, a near isolation that fostered a remarkable and unique culture that endures to this day. In hypnotic prose and sensual detail, Anna Sherman describes searching for the great bells by which the inhabitants of Edo, later called Tokyo, kept the hours in the shoguns’ city.

On December 16, 1945, Prince Konoe committed suicide after refusing to collaborate with US Army officer Bonner Fellers in Operation Blacklist. His refusal to exonerate Emperor Hirohito and the imperial family of war crimes responsibilities. A week before he took the cyanide, he wrote a memoir regarding his experience governing Imperial Japan during World War 2. The memoir shows many efforts of Prince Konoe's efforts for negotiations with Chinese and US government officials to try to end the war early as well as his governing during a time of crisis.

The Cultural Revolution, known in full as the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, was launched by Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Communist Party of China, as a means of quashing capitalism in China. Over the course of a decade, from the summer of 1966 to 1976, Mao Zedong implemented a number of changes that have led him to be known as one of the most brutal tyrants of the modern age. If you want to discover the captivating history of the Cultural Revolution, purchase this book today.

In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return. Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated not by the hardships of their journey, but by its aftermath: the establishment of a small Christian village in the Muslim Khanate of Khiva. Named Ak Metchet, "The White Mosque," after the Mennonites' whitewashed church, the village lasted for fifty years.

Perhaps the most famous and most destructive eruption in modern history was the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. Even without the instantaneous forms of communication that are now available, the world watched in wonder for new updates about a tiny South Pacific island. And though few of them would ever go there, Krakatoa remained a source of fascination for the much of the world for the next 50 years.

The true story of the fierce band of women who battled Washington - and Hanoi - to bring their husbands home from the jungles of Vietnam.

In 1848, the British East India Company, having lost its monopoly on the tea trade, engaged Robert Fortune, a Scottish gardener, botanist, and plant hunter, to make a clandestine trip into the interior of China - territory forbidden to foreigners - to steal the closely guarded secrets of tea horticulture and manufacturing. For All the Tea in China is the remarkable account of Fortune's journeys into China - a thrilling narrative that combines history, geography, botany, natural science, and old-fashioned adventure.

We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments.

Dr Michael Lynch provides a concise overview of the Chinese Civil War, a defining conflict in world history. Between the end of World War II and the dawn of the Cold War, one of the most important conflicts in modern history reached its climax. Delving into the political background and complex ramifications of the conflict, he assesses Mao and Chiang’s millions-strong armies, their strategies and commanders, and the critical campaigns that won and lost China.

Sex and World Peace unsettles a variety of assumptions in political and security discourse, demonstrating that the security of women is a vital factor in the security of the state and its incidence of conflict and war. Harnessing an immense amount of data, the authors call attention to discrepancies between national laws protecting women and the enforcement of those laws, and they note the adverse effects on state security of abnormal sex ratios favoring males, the practice of polygamy, and inequitable realities in family law, among other gendered aggressions.

Hello, Shadowlands takes a deep plunge into crime rings both large and small. It also examines how China’s rise and America’s decline are creating new opportunities for transnational syndicates to thrive. Focusing on human stories on both sides of this crime wave, the acclaimed Bangkok-based broadcaster and journalist Patrick Winn intimately profiles the men and women of the region who are forced to make agonizing choices in the absence of law.

If you want to discover the captivating history of Armenian history, then pay attention. Their story is tragic, but their survival is incredible. And that is what makes their tale so inspiring.

The magnificent collections contain a million pieces of art—objects that carry China’s deepest and most ancient memories. Among them are irreplaceable artefacts: exquisite paintings on silk, rare Ming porcelain, and the extraordinary Stone Drums of Qin, which are adorned with 2,500-year-old inscriptions of cultural significance.

'Nobody has done more harm to me than Jawaharlal Nehru,' wrote Subhas Chandra Bose in 1939. Had relations between the two great nationalist leaders soured to the extent that Bose had begun to view Nehru as his enemy? But then, why did he name one of the regiments of the Indian National Army after Jawaharlal? And what prompted Nehru to weep when he heard of Bose's untimely death in 1945 and to recount soon after, 'I used to treat him as my younger brother'?

Rebels Against the Raj tells the story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who across the late 19th to late 20th century arrived to join the freedom movement fighting for independence from British colonial rule.

The Punjab is defined by the floodplains of the five rivers that give the area its name, and as a result, it is one of the most fertile regions of South Asia. However, since the 1947 partition of India, the “Land of Five Rivers” is something of a misnomer, as the partition not only divided India but also the Punjab. The eastern part of Punjab remained a province of India while the western section was ceded to the newly created Pakistan.

In a rare attempt to understand the Indianness of Indians - among the most intelligent people in the world, but also, to a dispassionate eye, perhaps the most baffling - V. Raghunathan uses the props of game theory and behavioral economics to provide an insight into the difficult conundrum of why we are the way we are. He puts under the scanner our attitudes towards rationality and irrationality, selflessness and selfishness, competition and cooperation, and collaboration and deception.

It's a sure sign of fame when a man is known simply by his first name, and Mao Zedong, often referred to simply as Mao or Chairman Mao, was one of the most influential men of the 20th century. He was also arguably the most controversial; as the founder of the People's Republic of China, Mao rose from being a communist revolutionary to successfully overthrowing a regime and transforming China into a communist powerhouse in Asia.