Chinese Revolution

As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People's Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong's ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union's "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This 10-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation's economy.

Following the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, after a bloody civil war, Mao hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City, and the world watched as the Communist revolution began to wash away the old order. Due to the secrecy surrounding the country's records, little has been known before now about the eight years that followed, preceding the massive famine and Great Leap Forward. The Tragedy of Liberation bears witness to a shocking, largely untold history.

George Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is an intimate part of our contemporary culture, quoted so often that we tend to forget who wrote the original words! This must-read is also a must-listen!

The dramatic real-life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China's 1949 Communist revolution. Benny must decide either to escape to Hong Kong or navigate the intricacies of a newly Communist China. Annuo, forced to flee with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation from the US in order to continue his studies while his family struggles at home. Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America.

Red Notice is a searing expose of the wholesale whitewash by Russian authorities of Magnitsky's imprisonment and murder, slicing deep into the shadowy heart of the Kremlin to uncover its sordid truths.

This searing novel, originally banned in China but later named one of that nation's most influential books, portrays one man's transformation from the spoiled son of a landlord to a kindhearted peasant. After squandering his family's fortune in gambling dens and brothels, the young, deeply penitent Fugui settles down to do the honest work of a farmer. Forced by the Nationalist Army to leave behind his family, he witnesses the horrors and privations of the Civil War, only to return years later to face a string of hardships brought on by the ravages of the Cultural Revolution.

The Party is Financial Times reporter Richard McGregor's eye-opening investigation into China's Communist Party, and the integral role it has played in the country's rise as a global superpower and rival to the United States. Many books have examined China's economic rise, human rights record, turbulent history, and relations with the US; none until now, however, have tackled the issue central to understanding all of these issues: how the ruling communist government works. The Party delves deeply into China's secretive political machine.

The transcontinental railroads of the late 19th century were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating panics in the US economy. Their dependence on public largess drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, and remade the landscape of the West. As wheel and rail, car and coal, they opened new worlds of work and ways of life.

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 October 1781, American, French, and British forces converged on a small village named Yorktown—a place that the British would try to forget and Americans would forever remember. In his riveting, balanced, and thoroughly researched account of the Revolutionary War’s last pivotal conflict, author-historian Tim Grove follows the true stories of American, French, and British players, whose lives intersected at Yorktown.

Peach Blossom Paradise, set at the time of the reform, is the story of Xiumi, the daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. Days later, a man with a gold cicada in his pocket turns up at their family estate and is inexplicably welcomed as a relative.

More than fifty years on, the Cultural Revolution's scar runs through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shape China to this day. Yet official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia: it exists, for the most part, as an absence.

Xi Van Fleet lived through the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a schoolgirl. Forced to the countryside with other young Chinese for re-education after high school, she later escaped communism and found freedom and new a life in America. But more than 30 years later, Xi disturbingly sees signs of the same Cultural Marxism that ravaged her birth country of China threatening to destroy the America she now calls home.

These early philosophical writings underpinned the Chinese revolutions and their clarion calls to insurrection remain some of the most stirring of all time. Drawing on a dizzying array of references from contemporary culture and politics, Zizek's firecracker commentary reaches unsettling conclusions about the place of Mao's thought in the revolutionary canon.

The Mao Zedong Reader: How to Understand Chinese Ideology to Improve Foreign Policy and Relations with China Edited by Eric Engle For the first time, a comprehensive collection of Mao Zedong's most important writings is available in a single volume. The Mao Zedong Reader is the definitive guide to understanding the ideology that shaped modern China and continues to influence its foreign policy today. With a wide-ranging selection of Mao's writings, from his early revolutionary days to his later years as China's leader, this book provides a nuanced and balanced view of his thought. Dr. Eric ...

Here is the novel that will be forever considered a triumph of the imagination. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Maud'dib. He would avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family and would bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.

This is the story of the women who took part in the Long March, seen through the biographies of three key players. Lee and Wiles trace the womens' stories in three time periods: the Long March itself, a decade later at liberation and then 40 years on. Drawing on published and unpublished sources, including interviews, this is the moving story of one of the great events of 20th-century history.

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers.

Eminent China scholar Elizabeth C. Economy provides an incisive look at the transformative changes underway in China today. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has unleashed a powerful set of political and economic reforms: the centralization of power under Xi himself; the expansion of the Communist Party's role in Chinese political, social, and economic life; and the construction of a virtual wall of regulations to control more closely the exchange of ideas and capital between China and the outside world.

The eBook discusses the remarkable history and evolution of one of humanity's most transformative inventions—paper. It begins with the life and achievements of Cai Lun, the visionary Chinese inventor credited with revolutionizing the papermaking process around 105 CE during the Eastern Han Dynasty. His innovative technique, which involved blending natural materials such as tree bark, hemp, rags, and fishing nets to create a versatile and accessible medium, laid the foundation for the spread of knowledge, culture, and communication across the world. The narrative explores the historical ...