An IRA-CBC Children's Choice.An American Bookseller "Pick of the Lists."When Ping admits that he is the only child in China unable to grow a flower from the seeds distributed by the Emperor, he is rewarded for his honesty.

    Those engaged in this shadowy struggle called it 'The Great Game', a phrase immortalized in Kipling's Kim. When play firstbegan the two rival empires lay nearly 2,000 miles apart. By the end, some Russian outposts were within 20 miles of India.This book tells the story of the Great Game through the exploits of the young officers, both British and Russian, who risked their lives playing it. Disguised as holy men or native horsetraders, they mapped secret passes, gathered intelligence, and sought the allegiance of powerful khans. Some neverreturned.

    Praised as "a miracle of readability and scholarly authority," (Jonathan Mirsky) The Search for Modern China offers a matchless introduction to China's history.

    The foxes change shapes as quick as a wink, from rabbits to dogs to squirrels and geese. But their game turns dangerous when a hunter raises his bow. . . .Originally published in 1990, Grandfather Tang's Story will continue to delight new readers as the wonder of the tangram puzzle--and an endearing game between a grandfather and his granddaughter--reveals a story of magic, clever animals, and, ultimately, true friendship.An NCSS-CBC Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies An NCTE Notable Children's Trade Book in the Language Arts"Ingenious." --The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

    Kaye's fiction will discover here the source of the characters, settings, and certain incidents of her novels. Most of all, they will bask in this warm account of a young woman's remarkable life--and the beginnings of a love affair with an India whose time has passed but which has not been forgotten. 24 pages of black-and-white photographs.

    It was feared that sorcerers were roaming the land, clipping off the ends of men's queues (the braids worn by royal decree), and chanting magical incantations over them in order to steal the souls of their owners. In a fascinating chronicle of this epidemic of fear and the official prosecution of soulstealers that ensued, Philip Kuhn provides an intimate glimpse into the world of eighteenth-century China.Kuhn weaves his exploration of the sorcery cases with a survey of the social and economic history of the era. Drawing on a rich repository of documents found in the imperial archives, he presents in detail the harrowing interrogations of the accused--a ragtag assortment of vagabonds, beggars, and roving clergy--conducted under torture by provincial magistrates. In tracing the panic's spread from peasant hut to imperial court, Kuhn unmasks the political menace lurking behind the queue-clipping scare as well as the complex of folk beliefs that lay beneath popular fears of sorcery.Kuhn shows how the campaign against sorcery provides insight into the period's social structure and ethnic tensions, the relationship between monarch and bureaucrat, and the inner workings of the state. Whatever its intended purposes, the author argues, the campaign offered Hungli a splendid chance to force his provincial chiefs to crack down on local officials, to reinforce his personal supremacy over top bureaucrats, and to restate the norms of official behavior.This wide-ranging narrative depicts life in imperial China as it was actually lived, often in the participants' own words. Soulstealers offers a compelling portrait of the Chinese people--from peasant to emperor--and of the human condition.

    English master-gunner John Hawkwood uproots his family from their native land and journeys to this fabled city.With the city under threat by the Ottoman Turks, the Byzantine emperor is in desperate need of men like Hawkwood and the knowledge of cannon and gunpowder he brings. For a time, the Hawkwoods enjoy status and privilege in return for John’s superior abilities as an artillerist. But all good things must come to an end. When tragedy strikes, even the close relationship John shares with the emperor cannot absolve the family of their sins, and with little more than the clothes on their backs, the Hawkwoods flee Constantinople. Captured by the savage Turks, John Hawkwood swiftly changes his allegiance, and once more applies his considerable skills…this time serving the conquerors in their victorious surge across eastern Europe and Mediterranean shores.No man lives forever, but the Hawkwood line never dies. For five generations, the Hawkwood men serve their Turkish leaders faithfully as military leaders and envoys. Although showered with wealth and privilege and accorded honours commensurate with their rank, their fates lie in the often capricious hands of the Ottoman empire’s cruel leaders. Over a span of nearly one hundred and fifty years, the Hawkwoods must employ every ounce of political cunning they possess to survive the swirling intrigues and bloody massacres that dominate the world in which they live. For their wives and concubines, the uncertainties and dangers of life are no less severe: the punishment meted out to a Hawkwood man who fails his duty likewise falls upon his family.Beyond the gleaming wealth and the veneer of power lie grim spectres of betrayal and sudden death, the threat of ravishment and torture lurking behind the gilded pillars of their palaces and harems. And when the time comes to choose between Ottoman and Hawkwood, no one can say what the future might bring…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. This book was previously published under the pseudonym Alan Savage.Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

    Gathered together by Wu-men (Mumon), a thirteenth-century master of the Lin-chi (Rinzai) school, it is composed of forty-eight koans, or cases, each accompanied by a brief comment and poem by Wu-men.Robert Aitken, one of the premier American Zen masters, has translated Wu-men's text, supplementing the original with his own commentary -- the first such commentary by a Western master -- making the profound truths of Zen Buddhism accessible to serious contemporary students and relevant to current social concerns.

    But the wild creature pines for his mate. When Yasuko, the kitchen maid, releases the bird against her lord's command, she and the one-eyed servant, Shozo, are sentenced to death. The grateful bird intends to return their kindness, but can he outsmart the cruel lord?Winner of the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for Illustration, and a New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book of the Year.

    Essays by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama appear with Galen Rowell's dramatic images in a moving presentation of the splendors of Tibet's revered but threatened heritage.When Chinese communist troops invaded Tibet in 1950, the author was fifteen years old and the spiritual and temporal ruler of a nation the size of western Europe. Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, appealed to the United Nations for help and then fled across the Himalaya in winter to a border town, where he anxiously awaited political aid that never came.Like the mythical kingdom of Shangri-La, Tibet had sought isolation from the rest of the world. Diplomatic relations and foreign visitors had been shunned, and few people in the West knew what cultural and natural treasures lay threatened there. In the years that followed, the Dalai Lama struggled to maintain peace in Tibet and to protect his people's ways, but in 1959 he was forced to flee to India, where he remains today. There he has established a government in exile in Dharamsala that has endeavored to preserve Tibetan culture while preparing for a peaceful return to a free Tibet.As the Chinese cautiously opened select Tibetan doors to visitors in the 1980s, a sickening realization stole over the rest of the world: Tibet had been ravaged by the Chinese occupation. All but a dozen of Tibet's six thousand monasteries had been destroyed.Much of the once-bountiful wildlife had disappeared. A sixth of the population had perished. The picture seemed so bleak that many wondered whether there was anything worth saving in this wounded land.The Dalai Lama's heartening answer and Galen Rowell's magnificent photographs leave no doubt that the mystery and enchantment of Tibet, though seriously endangered, are still alive. To Tibetans the Dalai Lama is an incarnation of the Buddha of compassion. He has spent the last thirty years tirelessly advocating nonviolence and compassion to all living things as the answer to Tibet's plight. "My religion is simple," he says, "my religion is kindness."My Tibet movingly elaborates this message: here the Dalai Lama offers his views on how world peace, happiness, and environmental responsibility are inextricably linked. He explains the meaning of pilgrimage for Tibetan Buddhists and gives an engaging account of his early life in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. In addition, he reveals many sides to his nature—compassion, profound faith, common sense, generosity, a playful sense of humor—in personal reflections matched here to 108 photographs of the land he hasn't seen since 1959. Together the breathtaking photographs, which express Rowell's own commitment to the natural world, and the Dalai Lama's observations help preserve the enduring meaning of Tibet's culture, religion, and natural heritage.

    Pithy quatrains, ecstatic odes, and long rambles through the Mathnawi (including animal fables, jokes, and stories of human orneriness and innocence), all saturated with Rumi's deep teachings and images of his spiritual surrender.

    An organizer of the "dialogue delegation," whose goal was to negotiate with the government, Shen provides an insider's record of the day-to-day decisions that led up to June 4th. Written with the help of journalist Marianne Yen, the result is both a powerful documentary and a sensitive account of growing up in contemporary China. Now nearly ten years later as our fascination with post-Deng China continues to develop, Shen's story and the updated material he provides are weighted with increasing significance. Coupled with much of the recent analysis, Shen's firsthand account vividly contextualizes the Chinese government's opposition to democracy and offers meaningful insight into a country that promises to occupy an increasingly prominent position in the world."A cause for celebration . . . an important contribution to China's newly discovered historical memory." --New York Times Book ReviewShen Tong is a doctoral student in political sociology at Boston University and the founder of the Democracy for China Fund, which aims to support and publicize dissent networks in China. Marianne Yen is a former New York correspondent for the Washington Post.

    Publishers Weekly, for example, has recently remarked that "[Yau's poems] churn along with the bright inventiveness that ha[s] characterized his work . . . since the selected Radiant Silhouette from 1990." The inventiveness in question is one borne of an ethnic background that is at the fore in the work of Yau.Radiant Silhouette created the buzz about John Yau, and it is worth seeing what in turn created that title: the celebrated poems herein plumb the rejections, joys and confusions of growing up Chinese-American, and they are essential reading for any American, Chinese- or not, in today's America, more a melting pot than ever.

    A Chinese boy grows enormous and floats across the ocean to old Hawai'i in this new legend about the origin of Chinaman's Hat islet in Kane'ohe Bay.

    The conditions inflicted by that bomb transcend the capacity of words and even pictures to convey. Only those who were here at the time can know the full reality, and the survivors of that horror know from their experience that nuclear weapons are incompatible with human life on Earth. Many have spent their lives appealing constantly, "Never again! Nuclear weapons must be banned and eliminated." In this book, we present the thoughts, feelings, and memories of fifteen survivors (two of whom are now deceased). All have taken part in peace studies programs held by this Foundation, telling their A-bomb experiences to students who come to Hiroshima on school excursions. In addition, because so many Koreans and other non-Japanese were exposed to the bomb, we present a chapter contributed by an expert in that field.

    Nolan wants us to remember that it killed a lot of young Americans in Cambodia as well." -- The Capital Tittles (Madison, WI)"This is combat narrative at its best. Nolan has mastered the soldier's slang and weaves it expertly into the account .... full of combat anecdotes detailing battlefield leadership successes and failures." -- Military Review

    While victorious revolutionaries in Vietnam and Laos strengthened their special relationship, Vietnam’s relations with fraternal Cambodia and China deteriorated into full-scale war. The Vietnamese overthrow of Pol Pot’s regime in 1979 was condemned by the West, which joined with China to support the Khmer Rouge-dominated anti-Vietnamese resistance in Cambodia. An inter-communist war thus became one of the focal points of the New Cold War in the 1980s.This complex and paradoxical tangle of events is skilfully analysed by Evans and Rowley in their frank and lively book. Drawing on a wide range of sources and first-hand research, this new edition has been thoroughly revised to chart the interaction between Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and the changing configuration of regional and great-power politics up to the present day.

    After a year's detention, he continued to Tibet and India where he was recruited by British Intelligence to gather information on Chinese intentions in Eastern Tibet.

    Hoyt demonstrates both his flair for dramatic battle accounts and his penetrating eye for personal and political motivation. He offers a thorough and engaging portrait of Admiral Yamamoto and, from that vantage point, provides a revealing new view of the events of World War II."Yamamoto" details his life from his youth in Nagaoka and his early military successes, to the dynamic leader's orchestration of the infamous sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, his subsequent naval victories, and his eventual assassination by American fighter planes in the Solomon Islands at the order of President Roosevelt himself.

    It represents the most widespread and prolonged series of migrations by one nation ever. Chinese emigrants have been tycoons in Hong Kong and America, coolies in Peru and South Africa, underworld gangsters in San Francisco and Bangkok. Today, whether as near-slave laborers on illicit planes and freighters, or as bankers and traders from a world network of high finance, the Chinese are on the move as much as ever.In this rich blend of history, biography, and travel, noted author Lynn Pan recounts why emigrants have left China; how their dispersal has been shaped and stimulated by imperialist Western powers; and how the all-male frontier groups were transformed into complex communities organized by clan, dialect, and secret society. In the process, she takes us inside the supposedly closed world of the overseas Chinese and shows how, in a curious boomerang effect, these expatriates are currently changing the supposedly eternal face of China-perhaps forever. A new afterword by the author comments on the ironies that result when multiculturalism and emigrant culture meet head-on.

    Writing for a diverse audience, Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld lead their readers on an exploration of the different dimensions of this crisis: environmental degradation, agriculture on the road to extinction, deteriorating labor-management relations, eroding political legitimacy, and deepening structural fissures in the industrial economy.Showing how these problems stem from the dynamics of the model of high speed, export-oriented industrialization, they suggest strategies to surmount the unfolding crisis and open up the path to equitable and ecologically sustainable development. The first comprehensive critique of the "Newly Industrialized Countries" (NICs) paradigm, this book is a very welcome antidote to the usual uncritical celebration of the "dragon" or "tiger" economies.

    

    Step-by-step instructions for stitching patterns inspired by natural motifs, including 60 traditional patterns, and suggestions for basic sewing projects.

    For as the repression of Tibet's language, culture and religion continues, time for this unique and ancient civilization is running out.

    At the age of 28, he had become an invaluable aid to Stalin and the Politburo, and had he stayed in Stalin’s service, Bazhanov might well have enjoyed the same meteoric careers as the man who replaced him when he left, Georgy Malenkov. However, Bazhanov came to despise the unethical and brutal regime he served. One he decided to become anti–communist, he sought to bring down the regime. Planning his departure carefully, he brought with him documentation which revealed some of the innermost secrets of the Kremlin. Despite being pursued by the OGPU (an earlier incarnation of the KGB), he arrived eventually in Paris, and Bazhanov set to work writing his message to the West. While Bazhanov did successfully escape to the West, Stalin had Bazhanov watched and several attempts were made to assassinate him. Bazhanov may have been fearful for his life much of the time, but he was a man of courage and conviction, and he damned Stalin as often and as publicly as he could.In this riveting and illuminating book, Bazhanov provides an eyewitness account of the inner workings and personalities of the Soviet Central Committee and the Politburo in the 1920s. Bazhanov clearly details how Stalin invaded the communications of his opponents, rigged votes, built up his own constituency, and maneuvered to achieve his coup d’etat despite formidable odds. he also provides a better understanding of the curiously vapid way in which he other revolutionary leaders, most notably Trotsky, failed to appreciate the threat and let Stalin override them. He reveals how those Soviets with a sense of fairness, justice, and ethics were extinguished by Stalin and his minions, and how the self–centered, protective bureaucratic machine was first built. Bazhanov’s view, at the right hand of Stalin, is unique and chilling.Bazhanov’s post–defection prediction of Stalin’s continuing and fatal danger to Trotsky shows how well Bazhanov understood the dictator. His formation, in 1940, of an armed force recruited from Soviet Army prisoners to help Mannerheim defend Finland from Stalin’s forces and his 1941 decision to decline the position of Hitler’s Gauleiter of German–occupied Russia are fascinating. But perhaps the most interesting facet to Bazhanov’s tale is the fact that almost no Soviets—even today—know the real story of the Communist party’s criminal acquiescence in Stalin’s rise to, and abuse of, power.

    D?gen is known for his extensive writing including the Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma or Sh?b?genz?, a collection of ninety-five fascicles concerning Buddhist practice and enlightenment.The primary concept underlying D?gen's Zen practice is oneness of practice-enlightenment. In fact, this concept is considered so fundamental to D?gen's variety of Zen-and, consequently, to the S?t? school as a whole-that it formed the basis for the work Shush?-gi, which was compiled in 1890 by Takiya Takush? of Eihei-ji and Azegami Baisen of S?ji-ji as an introductory and prescriptive abstract of D?gen's massive work, the Sh?b?genz? (Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma).Dogen is a profoundly original and difficult 13th century Buddhist thinker whose works have begun attracting increasing attention in the West. Admittedly difficult for even the most advanced and sophisticated scholar of Eastern thought, he is bound, initially, to present an almost insurmountable barrier to the Western mind. Yet the task of penetrating that barrier must be undertaken and, in fact, is being carried out by many gifted scholars toiling in the Dogen vineyard.

    The distinguished authors bring a wealth of knowledge, visionary thinking, and accessible writing to each intriguing subject in these lavishly illustrated, large-format paperback books.

    

    Maurice Collis (1889-1973) spent more than twenty years as a British civil servant in Burma. He was a noted scholar and travel writer.