Free of ideological bias, profound in its undertsanding, and compassionate in its human portrayals, it is filled with fresh revelations drawn from secret documents and from exclusive interviews with participants-French, American, Vietnamese, Chinese: diplomats, military commanders, high government officials, journalists, nurses, workers, and soldiers. Originally published a companion to the Emmy-winning PBS series, Karnow’s defining book is a precursor to Ken Burns’s ten-part forthcoming documentary series, The Vietnam War. Vietnam: A History puts events and decisions into such sharp focus that we come to understand – and make peace with – a convulsive epoch of our recent history.

    A-qing, the adolescent hero, comes from an impoverished family. His father casts him out after learning that his son is gay. A-qing drifts into New Park, a gay hangout in Taipei, and begins his life as a hustler. He meets other boys living on the street, also forsaken by their families: Little Jade, who is constantly searching for his unknown father; Mousey, an orphan and petty thief; and Wu Min, a shy tender kid, who attempts suicide when discarded by a middle-aged man. These four boys become fast friends and are taken under the protection of Chief Yang, a fiftyish gay guru in the Park. The boys begin to build a family of their own. Meanwhile, A-qing meets Dragon Prince, whose passionate and faithful love for Phoenix Boy has become a legend of the Park...The second part of the novel deals with the Cozy Nest, a gay bar run by Chief Yang, where the boys and other homosexual exiles have found refuge. The bar is sponsored by Papa Fu, whose young soldier son had shot himself when his homosexuality was exposed.In Taiwan, the gay community is known as the buoliquan, literally "glass community," while the individuals are called "glass boys" or "Crystal Boys."Crystal Boys was first published in Taiwan and has since appeared in Hong Kong and in mainland China: two editions (Beijing and Harbin) were published in 1987. A film, Outcasts, based on the novel and directed by Yu Kan-Ping (1986) is currently available in the United States on video cassette (subtitled).

    Her new preface considers the geisha today as a vestige of tradition as Japan heads into the 21st century.

    After two years as a postgraduate student at Nanjing University in China, Vikram Seth hitch-hiked back to his home in New Delhi, via Tibet.  From Heaven Lake is the story of his remarkable journey and his encounters with nomadic Muslims, Chinese officials, Buddhists and others.

    Take a series of ships of different sizes and kinds, go where they lead and see what happens. Inspired by great sea writers like Jack London, Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, Gavin Young decided he would port-hop to some far destination on the other side of the world. The end of the line would be China."With its magical evocation of the past and the present, of far-off lands and people, vivid skies and bizarre flora and fauna, SLOW BOATS TO CHINA is compulsively readable and a travel book of rare distinction." (Publisher's Source)

    Brings insight and compassion to bear on the problems of insecurity and anxiety, and the solutions one finds through "attentiveness''--the key to true intelligence.

    Drawn into the colonial territories scattered around the South China Sea, they found themselves in an exotic, intoxicating world. It was a land of rickshaws and shanghai jars, sampans and Straits Steamers, set against a background of palm-fringed beaches and tropical rain-forests. But it was also a world of conflicting beliefs and many races, where the overlapping of widely differing moral standards and viewpoints created a heady and dangerous atmosphere.

    Buddhists have meditated in the mountains of Ladakh since three centuries before Christ, and it is there that the purest form of Tibetan Buddhism is still practiced today.

    They are exhilarating, masculine, terrified, pathetic and criminal. It is rare for a group of photographs to drag the viewer so violently into the middle of someone else's life.' - American Photographer

    The story of a resourceful, courageous woman, Charlotte Scott, it is also the story of Britain's first war with Afghanistan, which ended with a brutal massacre in the Khyber Pass. And it is a novel about the Empire: how the British gained it - and why they would lose it at last.Returning to India in 1837 after a sheltered childhood in England, seventeen year old Charlotte Scott finds not a loving mother but a cold, beautiful woman dismayed because her plain daughter cares more for politics and good works than for husband-hunting and frivolity. Charlotte finds her intelligence and sensitivity have no place in the peculiar world of the British army station, where full-dress balls and cricket matches are held amid Indian dust, heat, and sqaulor. Only one person truly befriends her: the athletic, handsome, unpretentious Richard Lingarde, considered the most eligible bachelor on the station. An engineer and speaker of native tongues, Richard knows what his fellow officers choose to ignore: the natives, both Indian and Afghan, despise the British and will defeat them in the end.Although bewitched by her mother's exotic cavalier, Major Dupres, Charlotte agrees to marry Richard - and soon alienates him unforgiveably. Richard is sent to war-torn Kabul, where he embarks upon a life of danger and depravity. As Charlotte sets out on a treacherous journey through the Khyber Pass to find him, she begins to grow from a naive young girl into a woman of valor.A love story of extraordinary depth and power, Beyond All Frontiers is a masterful combination of history, courage, surprise, and passion - a novel that makes us hope desperately to see the hero and heroine learn to care for each other as much as we care for them.

     She is desperately excited to explore not only the foreign land with all its alien culture but also the role of a wife and all the pleasures that come with it… In no time at all Constance is shocked on both accounts. China stuns her with its barbaric and improper behaviour which, almost against her will, begins to tease her imagination. At the same time, Mr Henry Baird, despairing of his sinful desires, proves unable to indulge Constance’s wishes. The marriage, failing from the beginning, spirals further and further out of control as Constance, aided by her only ally Kate, inadvertently becomes a famous ‘Devil Woman’ throughout the region and faces an audience with the Empress herself. As her new life unfolds, Constance finds herself tortured by desire, teetering on the edge of love and caught up in a dangerous whirlwind of international politics. She ricochets between the Chinese extremes of complete intimacy and deadly violence as they head slowly into war. What does ‘The Crimson Pagoda’ promise? ‘The Crimson Pagoda’ is a gripping and engaging historical romance by a master of the genre. Praise for Christopher Nicole: ‘Well-researched…Evocative descriptions of scenery and edifices, and exact period dialogue’ – Historical Novels Society Christopher Nicole was born and brought up in British Guyana and the West Indies. His output of books has been prolific and many of his novels are historical with a Caribbean background.

    Sionil Jose continues his excursion into the swamplands of the Filipino psyche. It is a depressing journey full of insights into the shallows and depths of the Filipino charcacter. Sionil Jose's stories are, therefore, not just literary guidposts - they are also impeccable social records that will not be found in today's newspapers and history books.

    The buildings there attest to the richness of an imperial presence that lasted--from the first trading settlement to the end of the Raj--some three hundred years. The attitude of the British to India was compounded partly of arrogance, but partly also of homesickness, and it shows in their constructions. Georgian terraces were adapted to tropical conditions, Victorian railway stations were elaborately orientalized, seaside villas were adjusted to suit Himalayan conditions, and everywhere the fundamental ambivalence of the British empire, a baffling mixture of good and evil, was mirrored in the imperial architecture.This book, now reissued with an introduction by Simon Winchester, was the first to describe the whole range of British constructions in India. The text and photographs illustrate these buildings not simply as physical objects, but as reflections of an empire's mingled emotions. Stones of Empire charts an enterprise in architecture, engineering, and social adaptation unique in human history.

    Illustrated in color.

    Rowell's text sets his own adventures in this exotic region against a rich historical and cultural background, recreating the exploits of and describing the dramatic changes that recent years have wrought on Chinese life and society. From the palaces of Lhasa to the pristine strongholds of the snow leopard, the 85 splendid color photographs and compelling narrative map a geography that stretches the bounds of imagination.

    

    

    In this book, two Bengali-speaking Americans take the reader to a Bangladesh village where they lived for nine months. There, the reader meets some of the world's poorest people - peasants, sharecroppers and landless labourers - and some of the not-so-poor people who profit from their misery. The villagers' poverty is not fortuitous, a result of divine dispensation or individual failings of character. Rather, it is the outcome of a long history of exploitation, culminating in a social order which today benefits a few at the expense of many.

    A long and thoughtful introduction to the evolution, characteristics, and orders of mammals is followed by the entries -- all illustrated in full color -- each containing the mammal's classification, description, and habitat as well as details on behavior, feeding habits, and reproduction. The entries also feature colorful symbols to illustrate habitat, color maps to show the distribution and rarity of each species, and line drawings to indicate unusual or notable physical features. With more than 500 color photographs, Simon & Schuster's Guide to Mammals is a superb and valuable reference.

    It mobilizes and encourages popular participation, and mounts distinctive organizing strategies. It illustrates the relevance of religious traditions for any alternative development efforts in the developing and industrialized worlds.

    

    The resulting historical perspective, Joe Moore contends, seriously distorts reality. Drawing on essential and unmined data, including national archive records of the early Occupation, Moore unmasks an agitated, divided, and potentially explosive Japan in the years immediately following World War II.

    

    The book concentrates on those Japanese women who were outspoken critics of their society and the roles women were assigned in it, but also assesses the contributions women made to Japan during a period of rapid modernization.The struggle of Japanese women to gain political rights, the creation of a women's reform movement, the involvement of women in the early socialistic movement, the protests of women textile workers who staged Japan's first strikes, the evolution of the women's movement into a literary movement, and a new view of Kanno Suga, an anarchist who was hanged by the Japanese government in 1911, are presented against the background of determined state intervention in the lives of women.The book concludes with a brief summary of the changing role of women in Japan since Meiji, and compares their experience with that of European and American women.