He is lured back again and again by his enduring fascination for the country and for Lan, a beautiful Vietnamese mandarin's daughter he could never forget. Over five haunting decades Joseph's life becomes deeply enmeshed with Vietnam's turbulent, war-torn fate - until he attempts to salvage something of lasting value during the final desperate helicopter scramble to flee defeated Saigon. First published in 1982, it has stood the test of time as critics predicted, and is now providing a new generation of readers with insights into that historic conflict - and its tragic echoes in Iraq. It has since become a bestseller in 15 countries and in eight other languages.

    Packed with personal letters, insightful anecdotes, and riveting stories of missionary life in China, this superb biography shines with God's constant faithfulness and power over evil.

    The lure of this mysterious land, and its strategic importance, made it inevitable that despite the Tibetans' reluctance to end their isolation, determined travelers from Victorian Britain, Czarist Russia, America, and a half dozen other countries world try to breach the country's high walls.In this riveting narrative, Peter Hopkirk turns his storytelling skills on the fortune hunters, mystics, mountaineers, and missionaries who tried storming the roof of the world. He also examines how China sought to maintain a presence in Tibet, so that whenever the Great Game ended, Chinese influence would reign supreme. This presence culminated in the Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1950s, and in a brief afterword, Hopkirk updates his compelling account of the gatecrashers of Tibet with a discussion of Tibet today--as a property still claimed and annexed by the Chinese.

    His people catch barely enough fish to live on, and so must distill salt to sell to neighboring villages. But this industry serves another, more sinister purpose: the fires of the salt cauldrons lure passing ships toward the shore and onto rocky shoals. When a ship runs aground, the villagers slaughter the crew and loot the cargo for rice, wine, and rich delicacies. One day a ship founders on the rocks. But Isaku learns that its cargo is far deadlier than could ever be imagined. Shipwrecks, the first novel by the great Japanese writer Yoshimura to be translated into English, is a stunningly powerful, Gothic tale of fate and retribution.

    Defying a brutal Kuomintang officer, she is swept to an electrifying first meeting with Dr. Jen Yong, a handsome, dedicated and compassionate Chinese surgeon. For Yong, a sexual liaison with an American woman could mean a death sentence. For Stephanie, an affair with an Asian man would cause an irreparable breach with her Texas millionaire father. But just when dangers to threatens to separate them forever, their passion bursts into flame, and carries them on a fabulous romantic journey from the stormy depths of fear and desire, to the moving affirmation that enduring love is truly a many-splendored thing

    The couple live beside a big mountain which causes them no end of trouble. Shadows fall over their garden. Rocks fall through their roof. And it is always raining. "Husband," says Ming Lo's wife, "you must move the mountain so that we may enjoy our house in peace." But how can a man as small as Ming Lo move something as large as a mountain? Maybe the village wise man can help. This whimsical literary folktale is set in China.

    Indianapolis and her crew. Just 4 days after this flagship of the massive Pacific Fifth Fleet had delivered the components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to the island of Tinian, she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sank within 15 minutes. Why the Navy failed to rescue these brave sailors and why they began a massive coverup that lasted for over 30 years is the subject of this book, based upon previously unavailable files that reveal this startling conspiracy to conceal the massive blunders that were made.

    In this volume Keith Taylor draws on both Chinese and Vietnamese sources to provide a balanced view of the early history of Vietnam.

    Here again is proof that the remarkable achievements of Chinese art, complex as they are, can be made understandable—and enjoyable—to art lovers anywhere. And the book will be no less welcome to scholars, with its masterly summation of recent research and theory together with the original insights of one of the world's leading authorities in the field. We turn here to the fascinating but extremely complicated art of the late Ming dynasty, with all its currents and crosscurrents of politics, art, and criticism. The time span is less than a hundred years, encompassing the years from 1570, through the decline of Ming fortunes, to the dynasty's final defeat by the Manchu hordes from the north in 1644. The turbulence of the period was echoed in its art, which saw the creation of some of China's great masterworks. Treated in detail are the lives and works of some forty-two of the period's leading artists. In the author's words: "Late Ming artists, besides producing a body of extraordinary interesting and sometimes superb paintings, were engaged in intricate ways with the past history of their art, and engaged also with their contemporary theorists in an elaborate interaction, a kind of cultural game that was played with especial intensity in this period. Theirs is often an intellectualized, historically conscious art; we can enjoy the paintings without reference to the issues that surround them, but to do so would be a severely limited reading of them. I have chosen instead to try to present them in all their complexity." There are over 150 plates, including 19 in color, both of familiar masterworks and of pieces that have seldom or never been seen in the West, culled from leading collections in Asia and the West. This wealth of visual delight and instruction ably reinforces a text that is written with a great facility of style.

    Although MITI was not the only important agent affecting the economy, nor was the state as a whole always predominant, I do not want to be overly modest about the importance of this subject. The particular speed, form, and consequences of Japanese economic growth are not intelligible without reference to the contributions of MITI. Collaboration between the state and big business has long been acknowledged as the defining characteristic of the Japanese economic system, but for too long the state's role in this collaboration has been either condemned as overweening or dismissed as merely supportive, without anyone's ever analyzing the matter.The history of MITI is central to the economic and political history of modern Japan. Equally important, however, the methods and achievements of the Japanese economic bureaucracy are central to the continuing debate between advocates of the communist-type command economies and advocates of the Western-type mixed market economies. The fully bureaucratized command economies misallocate resources and stifle initiative; in order to function at all, they must lock up their populations behind iron curtains or other more or less impermeable barriers. The mixed market economies struggle to find ways to intrude politically determined priorities into their market systems without catching a bad case of the "English disease" or being frustrated by the American-type legal sprawl. The Japanese, of course, do not have all the answers. But given the fact that virtually all solutions to any of the critical problems of the late twentieth century—energy supply, environmental protection, technological innovation, and so forth—involve an expansion of official bureaucracy, the particular Japanese priorities and procedures are instructive. At the very least they should forewarn a foreign observer that the Japanese achievements were not won without a price being paid.

    

    He is best known for the conquest of Japan's sixteenth-century warlords and the invasion of Korea. He is known, too, as an extravagant showman who rebuilt cities, erected a colossal statue of the Buddha, and entertained thousands of guests at tea parties. But his lasting contribution is as governor whose policies shaped the course of Japanese politics for almost three hundred years.In Japan's first experiment with federal rule, Hideyoshi successfully unified two hundred local domains under a central authority. Mary Elizabeth Berry explores the motives and forms of this new federalism which would survive in Japan until the mid-nineteenth century, as well as the philosophical question it raised: What is the proper role of government? This book reflects upon both the shifting political consciousness of the late sixteenth century and the legitimation rituals that were invoked to place change in a traditional context. It also reflects upon the architect of that change--a troubled parvenu who acted often with moderation and sometimes with explosive brutality.

    Rabbits / Kanai Mieko -- Fuji / Sono Ayako -- A bond for two lifetimes-gleani / Enchi Fumiko -- A mother's love / Okamoto Kanoko -- Crabs / Kono Taeko -- Happiness / Uno Chiyo.

    ebookstore.tandf.co.uk.

    The railway was commissioned by Japan and built with the blood and tears of Allied prisoners of war and press-ganged Javanese romushas.Henk Hovinga interviewed nearly one hundred former railroad workers and did painstaking archival research. The result is a moving book, richly illustrated with numerous authentic drawings of life in the internment camps, charts and photographs.The original Dutch version of The Sumatra Railroad has become the standard work on the crime of the Japanese railroad construction in Indonesia. Unfortunately this indescribable human catastrophe has always been overshadowed by the drama of the notorious Birma Railroad.This work is first and foremost a posthumous tribute to the thousands of slave workers who lost their lives for the Pakan Baroe Railroad. At the same time, it is a homage to the survivors, for whom the war traumas would never end.