We left the ground—I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way after years of waiting and wondering..." With these words, dated October 15. 1968, the late Father Thomas Merton recorded the beginning of his fateful journey to the Orient. His travels led him from Bangkok, through India to Ceylon, and back again to Bangkok for his scheduled talk at a conference of Asian monastic orders. There he unequivocally reaffirmed his Christian vocation. His last journal entry was made on December 8, 1968, two days before his untimely, accidental death. Amply illustrated with photographs he himself took along the way and fully indexed, the book also contains a glossary of Asian religious terms, a preface by the Indian scholar Amiya Chakravarty, a foreword and postscript by Brother Patrick Hart of the Abbey of Gethsemani, as well as several appendices, among them the text of Merton's final address.

    Of the three, Wang was the consummate master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify classical Chinese poetry. He developed a nature poetry of resounding tranquility wherein deep understanding goes far beyond the words on the page—a poetics that can be traced to his assiduous practice of Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism. But in spite of this philosophical depth, Wang is not a difficult poet. Indeed, he may be the most immediately appealing of China's great poets, and in Hinton's masterful translations he sounds utterly contemporary. Many of his best poems are incredibly concise, composed of only twenty words, and they often turn on the tiniest details: a bird's cry, a splinter of light on moss, an egret's wingbeat. Such imagistic clarity is not surprising since Wang was also one of China's greatest landscape painters. This is a breathtaking poetry, one that in true Zen fashion renders the ten thousand things of this world in such a way that they empty the self even as they shimmer with the clarity of their own self-sufficient identity.

    Fiction

    Li Po, a legendary carouser, was an itinerant poet whose writing, often dream poems or spirit-journeys, soars to sublime heights in its descriptions of natural scenes and powerful emotions. His sheer escapism and joy is balanced by Tu Fu, who expresses the Confucian virtues of humanity and humility in more autobiographical works that are imbued with great compassion and earthy reality, and shot through with humour. Together these two poets of the T'ang dynasty complement each other so well that they often came to be spoken of as one - 'Li-Tu' - who covers the whole spectrum of human life, experience and feeling.

    

    In a compound in Yenan, soon after the Japanese onslaught of July 7, 1937, 'Num Wales'Helen Foster Snowtook down the words of 'Kim Sam', the former a young American journalist who knew she was in on one of the scoops of the century, the latter a Korean who has decided to struggle against the Japanese occupiers of his homeland by joining the Chinese Communists. He was old beyond his 32 years due to sickness, imprisonment, torture and private brought on by voluntary participation in the struggles against the decaying social system and the rising new order of foreign imperialism. In a moment of truth, this revolutionary revealed his innermost thoughts in a way few human beings do. As a Korean member of the Chinese Communist party, Kim San was in a unique position to observe and report on the Chinese Revolution and its relation to movements in neighboring Korea and Japan. But as important as this book is to those interested in the history of revolution in Asia, it directly alerts modern radicals to some of the questions any movement on the left must face: the relation between study and practice, love and revolution, ends vs. means. Beyond that, as a gripping tale of adventure it can enthrall even the most politically disinterested.

    It contains two epilogues; one written in 1978 and the other in 1980 right before the Soviet invasion. Afghanistan traces the development of this country from tribal and politicallyunstable towards a system of representative government consistent with its cultural and historical patterns. The book traces the socio-economic, cultural and political development of this rugged country and can serve as an indicator of things to come in this unsettled land. Apart from the narrativethe author presents all this material to us through charts, maps and illustrations. It also contains appendices on music and calendars used in Afghanistan.

    Originally published: Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1973.

    Ostensibly the crew was to spy on Japanese naval movements, but to Tolley it was clear that their mission was to create an incident that would provoke war.Events overtook the plan, however, when Pearl Harbor was bombed before the Lanikai could get underway. When Bataan and Corregidor fell, she was ordered to set sail for Australia and became one of the few U.S. naval vessels to escape the Philippines. In this book Tolley tells the saga of her great adventure during these grim, early days of the war and makes history come alive as he regales the reader with details of the operation and an explanation of President Roosevelt's order. Tolley's description of their escape in Japanese warship-infested waters ranks with the best of sea tales, and few will be able to forget the Lanikai's 4,000-mile, three-month odyssey.

    Viggo Olsen continues to thrill readers with its blend of excitement, insight, and inspiration.

    Francis Henry Skrine’s A History of Russian Turkestan and the Central Asian Khanates from the Earliest Times is a comprehensive study of the history of Russia and its interactions with their neighbors to the east, from the time of Alexander up until the 19th century. Skrine noted in the preface: “A time when Russia's movements in the East are being watched by all with such keen interest seems a fitting one for the appearance of a work dealing with her Central Asian possessions. "That eternal struggle between East and West," to quote Sir William Hunter's apt phrase, has made Russia supreme in Central Asia, as it has made England mistress of India : and thus it has come to pass that two of the greatest European Powers find themselves face to face on the Asiatic Continent. On the results of that contact depends the future of Asia.Ten years have elapsed since Lord Curzon of Kedleston published his work entitled Russia in Central Asia, and in the interval no book on this subject has appeared in English. The intervening period has been one of change— almost of transformation—in the countries so brilliantly described by the present Viceroy of India.The authors of the present work have visited independently the land of which they write, and each may claim to have had exceptional facilities for studying those questions in which they were most interested.”