Showing titles in Asia

This searingly honest memoir describes growing up on an African farm during the Rhodesian Bush War and the twilight years of white colonialism in the 1970s. It also explores the shock and euphoria of Zimbabwean independence in the 1980s as St John navigates her way through the immense personal and political changes.

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.

Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte. Some People Need Killing is Evangelista's meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines' drug war.

To Love and Be Loved is a firsthand account of Mother Teresa’s last years, and the first book ever to detail her dealings with worldly matters. We see her gracefully navigate the opportunities and challenges of leadership, the perils of celebrity, and the humiliations and triumphs of aging. We also catch her indulging in chocolate ice cream, making jokes about mini-skirts, and telling the president of the United States he’s wrong. Above all, we see her extraordinary devotion to God and to the very poorest of His children.

A nation is exiled from itself to prison; a nation is re-awakened through the storytelling of its origins; understand Indonesia through Pramoedya’s books.

The stories of hibakusha - Japanese for atomic bomb survivors - lie at the heart of this compelling minute-by-minute account of 6 August 1945 - the day the world changed forever as the Enola Gay dropped its payload over Hiroshima, ushering in the nuclear age. These survivors and witnesses, now with an average age of over 90, are the last people alive who can still provide us with reliable and detailed testimony about life in Hiroshima before the bombings.

Only three short years after the end of the Japanese occupation, war came again to Malaya. The Chinese-backed guerrillas called it the War of the Running Dogs - their contemptuous term for those in Malaya who remained loyal to the British. The British Government referred to this bloody and costly struggle as the 'Malayan Emergency'. Yet it was a war that lasted twelve years and cost thousands of lives. By the time it was over Malaya had obtained its independence - but on British, not on Chinese or Communist terms.

China's Quest for Military Supremacy provides a broad and accessible exploration of Chinese military power, including relations between the Chinese Communist Party and its army, the strategic worldview of Chinese leaders, military strategy and resourcing, conventional and nuclear modernization, military diplomacy and coercion, preparations for war, and the People's Liberation Army's emerging global role.

The story of Hong Kong has long been obscured by competing myths- to Britain, a 'barren rock' with no appreciable history; to China, a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial that had at last returned to the ancestral fold. To its inhabitants, the city was a place of refuge and rebellion, whose own history was so little taught that they began mythmaking their own past.

Firsthand accounts from Japanese WW II soldiers, sailors, and pilots who fought in the battle for Iwo Jima and survived. Some were evacuated before the Marines landed, and others were taken as prisoners of war. The Japanese army and navy combatants are given a voice to share their experiences in the battle that coined the phrase "uncommon valor was a common virtue".

Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) led the Republic of China for almost fifty years, starting in 1926. He was the architect of a new republican China, a hero of the Second World War, and a faithful ally of the United States. Simultaneously a Christian and a Confucian, Chiang dreamed of universal equality yet was a perfidious and cunning dictator responsible for the deaths of over 1.5 million innocent people. This critical biography is based on Chiang Kai-shek's unpublished diaries, his extensive personal files from the Russian archives, and the Russian files of his relatives, associates, and foes.

In Voice for the Voiceless, the Dalai Lama reminds the world of Tibet’s unresolved struggle for freedom and the hardship his people continue to face in their homeland. The book captures his extraordinary life, uncovering what it means to lose your home to a repressive invader and build a life in exile; dealing with the existential crisis of a nation, its people, and its culture and religion; and envisioning the path forward.

Terracotta Warriors provides an intriguing, original and up-to-date account of one of the wonders of the ancient world. This is the first audiobook available for the general listener which incorporates the most recent excavations, new theories and discoveries. In one of the most astounding archaeological discoveries of all time, the Terracotta Warriors were discovered by chance by farmers in 1974.

The Last Mughal tells the story of the doomed Mughal capital, its tragic destruction, and the individuals caught up in one of the most terrible upheavals in history, as an army mutiny was transformed into the largest anti-colonial uprising to take place anywhere in the world in the entire course of the nineteenth century.

China: 1200 AD. Guo Jing has confronted Apothecary Huang, his sweetheart Lotus' father, on Peach Blossom Island, and bested the villainous Gallant Ouyang in three trials to win her hand in marriage. But now, along with his sworn brother, Zhou Botong of the Quanzhen Sect, and his shifu, Count Seven Hong, chief of the Beggar Clan, he has walked into a trap. Tricked by Huang into boarding an unseaworthy barge, they will surely drown unless Lotus - who has overheard her father's plans - can find a way to save them.

Lost Enlightenment recounts how, between the years 800 and 1200, Central Asia led the world in trade and economic development, the size and sophistication of its cities, the refinement of its arts, and, above all, in the advancement of knowledge in many fields. Central Asians achieved signal breakthroughs in astronomy, mathematics, geology, medicine, chemistry, music, social science, philosophy, and theology, among other subjects.

Of the many myths that emerged following the end of the Korean War, the prevailing one in the West was that of the absolute supremacy of US Air Force pilots and aircraft over their Soviet-supplied opponents. The claims of the 10:1 victory-loss ratio achieved by the US Air Force fighter pilots flying the North American F-86 Sabre against their communist adversaries, amongst other such fabrications, went unchallenged until the end of the Cold War, when Soviet records of the conflict were finally opened. From that point onwards, a very different story began to emerge.

The jagged mountains dividing China and Burma belong to the Wa, an indigenous group who have outwitted the CIA to create the world's mightiest narco-state, controlling more territory than Israel and with more troops than Sweden. Are they crime lords? Or visionaries?

Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil present an unprecedented look into the murky world of Chinese espionage both past and present, enabling a better understanding of how pervasive and important its influence is, both in China and abroad.

When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified ‘Great Britain’ under the Stuart monarchy.