The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... and Why


Richard E. Nisbett - 2003
    As a result, East Asian thought is “holistic”—drawn to the perceptual field as a whole and to relations among objects and events within that field. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behavior. From feng shui to metaphysics, from comparative linguistics to economic history, a gulf separates the children of Aristotle from the descendants of Confucius. At a moment in history when the need for cross-cultural understanding and collaboration have never been more important, The Geography of Thought offers both a map to that gulf and a blueprint for a bridge that will span it.

My Fight For Irish Freedom


Dan Breen - 1924
    Dan Breen was to become the best known of them. At first they were condemned on all sides. They became outlaws and My Fight describes graphically what life was like 'on the run, ' with 'an army at one's heels and a thousand pounds on one's head'. A burning belief in their cause sustained them through many a dark and bitter day and slowly support came from the people

The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan


Ivan Morris - 1964
    Using as a frame of reference The Tale of Genji and other major literary works from Japan's Heian period, Morris recreates an era when woman set the cultural tone. Focusing on the world of the emperor's court-the world so admired by Virginia Woolf and others-he describes the politics, society, religious life, and superstitions of the times, providing detailed portrayals of the daily life of courtiers, the cult of beauty they espoused, and the intricate relations between the men and women of this milieu.

Dumb Money


Daniel Gross - 2009
    Companies are shutting down and laying off workers, 401ks are melting away, and the government is spending $700 billion dollars to bail out banks and financial institutions -- and that's only the beginning. The financial services industry, and the many industries that depend on it -- from housing to cars -- is in intensive care. So what happened? How did we get to this point of financial disaster? Is the economy just a huge, Madoff-esque Ponzi scheme? It is a complicated and confusing story -- but Daniel Gross of Newsweek has a special gift for making complicated matters easy to understand and even entertaining. In Dumb Money, he offers a guide to the debacle and to what the future may hold. This is not so much a book about who did what, though that's part of the story. Rather, it pieces together the building blocks of the debt-fueled economy, and distills the theory and personalities behind our late, lamented easy money culture. Dumb Money is a book that finally lays it all out in an engaging way, and might just help people invest their money smartly until the gloom passes.

Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China


James M. Fallows - 2008
    The United States is the only nation with the scale and power to try to set the terms of its interaction with China rather than just succumb. So starting now, Americans need to consider the economic, environmental, political, and social goals they care about defending as Chinese influence grows.” —from “China Makes, the World Takes”Since December 2006, The Atlantic Magazine's James Fallows has been writing some of the most discerning accounts of the economic and political transformation occurring in China. The ten essays collected here cover a wide-range of topics: from visionary tycoons and TV-battling entrepreneurs, to environmental pollution and how China subsidizes our economy. Fallows expertly and lucidly explains the economic, political, social, and cultural forces at work turning China into a world superpower at breakneck speed. This eye-opening and cautionary account is essential reading for all concerned not only with China's but America's future role in the world.

Imperial China 900-1800


Frederick W. Mote - 2000
    A senior scholar of this epoch, F. W. Mote highlights the personal characteristics of the rulers and dynasties and probes the cultural theme of Chinese adaptations to recurrent alien rule. No other work provides a similar synthesis: generational events, personalities, and the spirit of the age combine to yield a comprehensive history of the civilization, not isolated but shaped by its relation to outsiders.This vast panorama of the civilization of the largest society in human history reveals much about Chinese high and low culture, and the influential role of Confucian philosophical and social ideals. Throughout the Liao Empire, the world of the Song, the Mongol rule, and the early Qing through the Kangxi and Qianlong reigns, culture, ideas, and personalities are richly woven into the fabric of the political order and institutions. This is a monumental work that will stand among the classic accounts of the nature and vibrancy of Chinese civilization before the modern period.

The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao


Ian Johnson - 2017
     The Souls of China tells the story of one of the world's great spiritual revivals. Following a century of violent anti-religious campaigns, China is now filled with new temples, churches, and mosques--as well as cults, sects, and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Driving this explosion of faith is uncertainty--over what it means to be Chinese and how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality a century ago and is searching for new guideposts.Ian Johnson first visited China in 1984; in the 1990s he helped run a charity to rebuild Daoist temples, and in 2001 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the suppression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. While researching this book, he lived for extended periods with underground church members, rural Daoists, and Buddhist pilgrims. Along the way, he learned esoteric meditation techniques, visited a nonagenarian Confucian sage, and befriended government propagandists as they fashioned a remarkable embrace of traditional values. He has distilled these experiences into a cycle of festivals, births, deaths, detentions, and struggle--a great awakening of faith that is shaping the soul of the world's newest superpower.

Fool Me Twice: Obama's Shocking Plans for the Next Four Years Exposed


Aaron Klein - 2012
     Months of painstaking research into thousands of documents have enabled investigative journalists and New York Times bestselling authors Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott to expose the secret template for Obama's next four years -- the one actually created by Obama's own top advisers and strategists. Just as Obama concealed the true plans for his initial term behind rhetoric of ending partisan differences and cutting the Federal deficit, Obama's re-election theme of creating jobs conceals more than it reveals about his real agenda for a second term. All the main areas of domestic policy are covered -- jobs, wages, health care, immigration overhaul, electoral "reform," national energy policy. Each of the plans exposed seek to permanently remake America into a government-dominated socialist state. Here are just a few samples from dozens upon dozens of specific schemes unveiled herein: Detailed plans to enact single-payer health care legislation controlled by the Federal government regardless of any Supreme Court decision to overturn Obamacare; The recreation of a 21st century version of FDR's Works Progress Administration (WPA) program within the Department of Labor that would oversee a massive new bureaucracy and millions of new Federal jobs; Further gutting of the U.S. military in shocking ways, while using the "savings" for a new "green" stimulus program and the founding of a Federal "green" bank to fund so-called environmentally friendly projects; The vastly reduced resources of the U.S. Armed Forces will be spread even thinner by using them to combat "global warming," fight global poverty, remedy "injustice," bolster the United Nations and step up use of "peacekeeping" deployments; An expansive new amnesty program for illegal aliens linked with a reduction in the capabilities of the U.S. Border Patrol and plans to bring in untold numbers of new immigrants with the removal of caps on H-1B visas and green cards. Fool Me Twice is based on exhaustive research into the coming plans and presidential policies as well as the specific second term recommendations of the major "progressive" groups behind Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership - the organizations that help to craft the legislation and set the political and rhetorical agenda for the president and his allies. While many have general concerns about Obama's second-term ambitions, Fool Me Twice lays bare the devastating details of a second Obama presidency. If he wins re-election in 2012, the America of equal opportunity for all, Constitutionally-limited government, economic freedom and personal liberty will be but a distant memory.

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community


Robert D. Putnam - 2000
    This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, which The Economist hailed as "a prodigious achievement."Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans' changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how social structures--whether they be PTA, church, or political parties--have disintegrated. Until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor had anyone exalted their fundamental power in creating a society that is happy, healthy, and safe.Like defining works from the past, such as The Lonely Crowd and The Affluent Society, and like the works of C. Wright Mills and Betty Friedan, Putnam's Bowling Alone has identified a central crisis at the heart of our society and suggests what we can do.

The Portable Karl Marx


Karl Marx - 1983
    Includes the complete Communist Manifesto and substantial extracts from On the Jewish Question, the German Ideology, Grundrisse, and Capital, a broad representation of his letters, and lesser-known works, especially his long-unavailable, early works.

From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai'i


Haunani-Kay Trask - 1999
    This 1999 revised work includes material that builds on issues and concerns raised in the first edition: Native Hawaiian student organizing at the University of Hawai'i; the master plan of the Native Hawaiian self-governing organization Ka Lahui Hawai'i and its platform on the four political arenas of sovereignty; the 1989 Hawai'i declaration of the Hawai'i ecumenical coalition on tourism; and a typology on racism and imperialism. Brief introductions to each of the previously published essays brings them up to date and situates them in the current Native Hawaiian rights discussion.