Jian Ping's father, a high-ranking government official, was falsely accused of treason during the Cultural Revolution-he was detained, beaten, and publicly shamed. Her mother Gu Wenxiu, a top administrator of a middle school, was paraded in public and detained by the Revolution Committee and the Red Guards-both driving forces of the Cultural Revolution. Facing abuse and deprivation, Jian Ping's family stands steadfastly together, from her aging grandmother, a frail woman with bound feet, to her parents and siblings. The traumatic impacts of their experiences shape the course of their lives forever. Based on her own memories, as well as interviews and exhaustive research, Mulberry Child is a family saga and a tale of resilience, a coming of age story told through the eyes of an innocent child. Mulberry Child allows us an insider's look into a closed-off world and is written with compassion in honest and intimate language. Testimonials "Jian Ping's book Mulberry Child is a moving account of her family's struggle to survive China's Cultural Revolution. She has in her poignant memoir helped Westerners to understand this little-known period in China's history, and put tragic and heroic faces to the individuals who suffered through that time. Mulberry Child is important reading for anyone who wants to understand where modern China has come from." --Rob Gifford, former Beijing Correspondent of NPR, and author of China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power "Jian Ping pays tribute to her parents who struggled against tremendous odds.... that she herself survived to write this memoir, and to tell it with such maturity and wisdom and forgiveness, is a tribute to her family, her generation and her nation." --Larry Engelmann, author of Feather in a Storm and Daughter of China "In Mulberry Child, Jian Ping has written a moving, important account of an extraordinary time. And she has done so with grace, acuity and a generosity of spirit. Mulberry Child is one compelling read." --Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Were No Children Here

    Carr's skills as historian and storyteller come to the fore in this thrilling account of the kind of adventurer the world no longer sees. Photographs.

    From the moment when the dsitute Prussian Adolph Coors stows away to America in 1868, through the creation of the Heritage Foundation, to the global expansion of the billion-dollar Coors Brewing Company, the Coors family triumphed by iron-willed commitment to its own values -- values that ironically prove the family's undoing on both the business and political fronts.Acclaimed writer Dan Baum captures it all, from Adolph's Prohibition-provoked suicide to the banishment of an heir-apparent for marrying without permission. Baum vividly depicts the genius, eccentricity, and tragic weaknesses of the remarkable Coors family.

    Now, as the Party's 18th National Congress oversees the biggest leadership transition in decades, and installs the Bo family's long-time rival Xi Jinping as president, China's rulers are finding it increasingly difficult to keep their poisonous internal divisions behind closed doors.Bo Xilai's breathtaking fall from grace is an extraordinary tale of excess, murder, defection, political purges and ideological clashes going back to Mao himself, as the princeling sons of the revolutionary heroes ascend to control of the Party. China watcher John Garnaut examines how Bo's stellar rise through the ranks troubled his more reformist peers, as he revived anti-'capitalist roader' sentiment, even while his family and associates enjoyed the more open economy's opportunities. Amid fears his imminent elevation to the powerful Standing Committee was leading China towards another destructive Cultural Revolution, have his opponents seized their chance now to destroy Bo and what he stands for? The trigger was his wife Gu Kailai's apparently paranoid murder of an English family friend, which exposed the corruption and brutality of Bo's outwardly successful administration of the massive city of Chongqing. It also led to the one of the highest-level attempted defections in Communist China's history when Bo's right-hand man, police chief Wang Lijun, tried to escape the ruins of his sponsor's reputation.Garnaut explains how this incredible glimpse into the very personal power struggles within the CCP exposes the myth of the unified one-party state. With China approaching super-power status, today's leadership shuffle may set the tone for international relations for decades. Here, Garnaut reveals a particularly Chinese spin on the old adage that the personal is political.

    His amazing, unprecedented collection of animals, plants and insects from all around the world gained international fame during his lifetime. In 1731, after decades of collecting, Seba commissioned illustrations of each and every specimen and arranged the publication of a four-volume catalog detailing his entire collection?from strange and exotic plants to snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, insects, butterflies and more, as well as fantastic beasts, such as a hydra and a dragon. Seba's scenic illustrations, often mixing plants and animals in a single plate, were unusual even for the time. Many of the stranger and more peculiar creatures from Seba's collection, some of which are now extinct, were as curious to those in Seba's day as they are to us now. This reproduction is taken from a rare, hand-colored original. The introduction offers background information about the fascinating tradition of the cabinet of curiosities to which Seba's curiosities belonged.

    On Jawaharlal Nehru's 50th death anniversary, Ramachandra Guha assesses his place in history, and his contribution to the building of modern India and its democratic institutions

    Knowing a kindred spirit when he met one, Mozart wrote "That was wonderful" in his journal and took the bird home to be his pet. For three years Mozart and his family enjoyed the uniquely delightful company of the starling until one fitful April when the bird passed away.In 2013, Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Crow Planet, rescued her own starling, Carmen, who has become a part of her family. In Mozart's Starling, Haupt explores the unlikely bond between one of history's most controversial characters and one of history's most notoriously disliked birds. Part natural history, part story, Mozart's Starling will delight readers as they learn about language, music, and the secret world of starlings. A charming story of Mozart and his pet starling, along with a natural history of the bird.

    "It can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend." In a book that is itself beautifully written, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores this timeless concept, asking what makes an object--either in art, in nature, or the human form--beautiful. This compact volume is filled with insight and Scruton has something interesting and original to say on almost every page. Can there be dangerous beauties, corrupting beauties, and immoral beauties? Perhaps so. The prose of Flaubert, the imagery of Baudelaire, the harmonies of Wagner, Scruton points out, have all been accused of immorality, by those who believe that they paint wickedness in alluring colors. Is it right to say there is more beauty in a classical temple than a concrete office block, more beauty in a Rembrandt than in an Andy Warhol Campbell Soup Can? Can we even say, of certain works of art, that they are too beautiful: that they ravish when they should disturb. But while we may argue about what is or is not beautiful, Scruton insists that beauty is a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature, and that the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world. Forthright and thought-provoking, and as accessible as it is stimulating, this fascinating meditation on beauty draws conclusions that some may find controversial, but, as Scruton shows, help us to find greater meaning in the beautiful objects that fill our lives.

    He argues that these turning points in the country’s history were not the result of foresight or careful planning but were rather the accidental consequences of major crises that had to be resolved at any cost.

    With over ninety illustrations, this book traces the history of the chair as we know it from its crudest beginnings up through the modern office variety. Drawing on anecdotes, literary references, and famous designs, Galen Cranz documents our ongoing love affair with the chair and how its evolution has been governed not by a quest for comfort or practicality, but by the designation of status.Relating much of the modern era's rampant back pain to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle spent in traditional seating, Cranz goes beyond traditional ergonomic theory to formulate new design principles that challenge the way we think and live. A farsighted and innovative approach to our most intimate habitat, this book offers guidelines that will assist readers in choosing a chair-and designing a lifestyle-that truly suits our bodies. Praise for The Chair:  "[A] concise, multidisciplinary gem."—Publishers Weekly "Cranz is no sedentary historian. The Chair is a call to action."—Jonathan Levi, Los Angeles Times "Galen Cranz has written a provocative book. Pull up a comfortable chair-if you can find one-and read it."—Witold Rybczynski

    But as architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart point out in this provocative, visionary book, such an approach only perpetuates the one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model, dating to the Industrial Revolution, that creates such fantastic amounts of waste and pollution in the first place. Why not challenge the belief that human industry must damage the natural world? In fact, why not take nature itself as our model for making things? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we consider its abundance not wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective.Waste equals food. Guided by this principle, McDonough and Braungart explain how products can be designed from the outset so that, after their useful lives, they will provide nourishment for something new. They can be conceived as "biological nutrients" that will easily reenter the water or soil without depositing synthetic materials and toxins. Or they can be "technical nutrients" that will continually circulate as pure and valuable materials within closed-loop industrial cycles, rather than being "recycled" -- really, downcycled -- into low-grade materials and uses. Drawing on their experience in (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, McDonough and Braungart make an exciting and viable case for putting eco-effectiveness into practice, and show how anyone involved with making anything can begin to do as well.

    That is the stark conclusion of this comprehensive investigation into the Chinese state's secret program to get rid of political dissidents while profiting from the sale of their organs--in many cases to Western recipients. Based on interviews with top-ranking police officials and Chinese doctors who have killed prisoners on the operating table, veteran China analyst Ethan Gutmann has produced a riveting insider's account--culminating in a death toll that will shock the world.  Why would the Chinese leadership encourage such a dangerous perversion of their medical system? To solve the puzzle, Gutmann journeyed deep into the dissident archipelago of Falun Gong, Tibetans, Uighurs and House Christians, uncovering an ageless drama of resistance, eliciting confessions of deep betrayal and moments of ecstatic redemption. In an age of compassion fatigue, Gutmann relies on one simple truth: those who have made it back from the gates of hell have stories to tell. And no matter what baggage the reader may bring along, their preconceptions of China will not survive the trip.From the Hardcover edition.

    Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks and condo towers an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl?The award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, during an exhilarating journey through some of the world’s most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a “sexy” bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris’s urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have hacked the design of their own streets and neighborhoods.Rich with new insights from psychology, neuroscience and Montgomery’s own urban experiments, Happy City reveals how our cities can shape our thoughts as well as our behavior. The message is as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting cities and our own lives for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city can save the world--and all of us can help build it.

    A plainspoken account of living in Asia."  --San Francisco ChronicleAnyone who has heard his weekly commentary on NPR knows that T. R. Reid is trenchant, funny, and deeply knowledgeable reporter and now he brings this erudition and humor to the five years he spent in Japan--where he served as The Washington Post's Tokyo bureau chief.  He provides unique insights into the country and its 2,500-year-old Confucian tradition, a powerful ethical system that has played an integral role in the continent's "postwar miracle."Whether describing his neighbor calmly asserting that his son's loud bass playing brings disrepute on the neighborhood, or the Japanese custom of having students clean the schools, Reid inspires us to consider the many benefits of the Asian Way--as well as its drawbacks--and to use this to come to a greater understanding of both Japanese culture and America.

    He writes of bureaucrats, students and Cultural Revolution survivors, stripping none of their complexity and humanity. He's gentle with their idiocies, saving his sharpest barbs for himself (it's his pants that split from zipper to waist whilst demonstrating martial arts in Canton). Though dribs of history and drabs of classical lore seep through, this is mostly a personal tale, noted by the Los Angeles Times for "the charmingly unpretentious manner in which it penetrates a China inaccessible to other foreigners."