The next ten years will be a time of massive transition. The wars in the Islamic world will be subsiding, and terrorism will become something we learn to live with. China will be encountering its crisis. We will be moving from a time when financial crises dominate the world to a time when labor shortages will begin to dominate. The new century will be taking shape in the next decade. In The Next Decade, George Friedman offers readers a pro­vocative and endlessly fascinating prognosis for the immedi­ate future. Using Machiavelli’s The Prince as a model, Friedman focuses on the world’s leaders—particularly the American president—and with his trusted geopolitical insight analyzes the complex chess game they will all have to play. The book also asks how to be a good president in a decade of extraordinary challenge, and puts the world’s leaders under a microscope to explain how they will arrive at the decisions they will make—and the consequences these actions will have for us all.From the Hardcover edition.

    Within one generation, China has transformed from an impoverished, repressive state into an economic and political powerhouse. In China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, Jeffrey Wasserstrom provides cogent answers to the most urgent questions regarding the newest superpower and offers a framework for understanding its meteoric rise.Focusing his answers through the historical legacies--Western and Japanese imperialism, the Mao era, and the massacre near Tiananmen Square--that largely define China's present-day trajectory, Wasserstrom introduces readers to the Chinese Communist Party, the building boom in Shanghai, and the environmental fall-out of rapid Chinese industrialization. He also explains unique aspects of Chinese culture such as the one-child policy, and provides insight into how Chinese view Americans.Wasserstrom reveals that China today shares many traits with other industrialized nations during their periods of development, in particular the United States during its rapid industrialization in the 19th century. Finally, he provides guidance on the ways we can expect China to act in the future vis-�-vis the United States, Russia, India, and its East Asian neighbors.

    Hinduism does not lend itself easily to a strictly chronological account: many of its central texts cannot be reliably dated even within a century; its central tenets—karma, dharma, to name just two—arise at particular moments in Indian history and differ in each era, between genders, and caste to caste; and what is shared among Hindus is overwhelmingly outnumbered by the things that are unique to one group or another. Yet the greatness of Hinduism—its vitality, its earthiness, its vividness—lies precisely in many of those idiosyncratic qualities that continue to inspire debate today. Wendy Doniger is one of the foremost scholars of Hinduism in the world. With her inimitable insight and expertise Doniger illuminates those moments within the tradition that resist forces that would standardize or establish a canon. Without reversing or misrepresenting the historical hierarchies, she reveals how Sanskrit and vernacular sources are rich in knowledge of and compassion toward women and lower castes; how they debate tensions surrounding religion, violence, and tolerance; and how animals are the key to important shifts in attitudes toward different social classes.The Hindus brings a fascinating multiplicity of actors and stories to the stage to show how brilliant and creative thinkers—many of them far removed from Brahmin authors of Sanskrit texts—have kept Hinduism alive in ways that other scholars have not fully explored. In this unique and authoritative account, debates about Hindu traditions become platforms from which to consider the ironies, and overlooked epiphanies, of history.

    Each chapter provides a biography of one killer, describing the formative experiences that turned them into monsters, their hidden lives and gruesome crimes. It explains how each was caught, including descriptions of psychological profiles and crime investigation procedures, and their ultimate fate. Timelines and victim panels detail their atrocities and horrific death tolls. Dramatic black and white photography shows each killer at their sinister worst.

    After introducing the reader to the region's history from the origins of Islam in the seventh century, Cleveland focuses on the past two centuries of profound and often dramatic change. While built around a framework of political history, the book also carefully integrates social, cultural, and economic developments into a single, carefully crafted account. The revised and updated third edition of this benchmark text places the developments of the 1990s in a new historical perspective and includes an examination of key events of the early twenty-first century. An epilogue offers a critical evaluation, from a historian's perspective, of the al-Qa'ida attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the early phases of the US occupation of Iraq.

    The Travels recounts Polo's journey to the eastern court of Kublai Khan, the chieftain of the Mongol empire which covered the Asian continent, but which was almost unknown to Polo's contemporaries. Encompassing a twenty-four year period from 1271, Polo's account details his travels in the service of the empire, from Beijing to northern India and ends with the remarkable story of Polo's return voyage from the Chinese port of Amoy to the Persian Gulf. Alternately factual and fantastic, Polo's prose at once reveals the medieval imagination's limits, and captures the wonder of subsequent travel writers when faced with the unfamiliar, the exotic or the unknown.

    With an increasing number of graduate and business school applicants and an increasing number of GRE test-takers—now a complete test overhaul by the test-maker—a high GRE score is critical to set yourself apart from the competition.New GRE 2011-2012 Premier with CD-ROM is a comprehensive package that includes a book, CD-ROM, and online companion with in-depth strategies, test information, and practice questions to help students score higher on the new GRE Revised General Test. New GRE 2011-2012 Premier with CD-ROM is fully updated and revised with 75 percent all-new content covering the revised and expanded Verbal, Quantitative, and Analytical Writing Assessment Test sections, including 50 percent new practice questions and brand new strategies for each of the new question types.New GRE 2011-2012 Premier with CD-ROM features:6 full-length practice tests (1 in the book, 5 online)400 practice questions and answer explanations on the CD-ROMA detailed overview of the test changesKey strategies for all New GRE question typesDetails and practice sets for the Verbal and Quantitative sectionsDiagnostic tool in end-of-chapter practice sets for even more targeted practiceAdvice for the graduate school application processKaplan guarantees that readers will score higher on the GRE Revised General Test using our guide—or get their money back.

    That is, until he swiped a Soviet MiG-15 and delivered it to the Americans, not knowing they were offering a $100,000 bounty for the warplane (the equivalent of nearly one million dollars today). The theft—just weeks after the Korean War ended in July 1953—electrified the world and incited Kim’s bloody vengeance.During the Korean War the United States brutally carpet bombed the North, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and giving the Kim dynasty, as Harden reveals, the fact-based narrative it would use to this day to sell paranoia and hatred of Americans.Drawing on documents from Chinese and Russian archives about the role of Mao and Stalin in Kim’s shadowy rise, as well as from never-before-released U.S. intelligence and interrogation files, Harden gives us a heart-pounding escape adventure and an entirely new way to understand the world’s longest-lasting totalitarian state.

    And for all the familiarity a blue and white porcelain vase from the Ming dynasty or the bright and sturdy pottery figures of horses and grooms from the T'ang may now have acquired, the history of the civilization that produced them remains obscure. So do the names of the potters and artists and philosophers and emperors and generals — except perhaps for those of Kublai Khan, who was not Chinese, and K'ung Fu Tzu — known as Confucius — who flourished a century before Socrates. Focusing upon the incidents and personalities that epitomize most vividly each of the dynasties, this lucidly narrated volume, beautifully illustrated by a lavish selection of color photographs, places in their historical context the images that came to define imperial China from its origins in 1600 B.C. to the revolution of Sun Yat-sen in October 1911. It provides a background to China's turbulent twentieth century, which is surveyed in an informative postscript, highlighting such events as the troubled presidency of Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Tse-tung's ruthless Cultural Revolution, and the 1989 student protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

    No one would foresee that the greatest success story to arise from these events would be the globalization of organized crime. "McMafia" is a fearless, encompassing, wholly authoritative investigation of the now proven ability of organized crime worldwide to find and service markets driven by a seemingly insatiable demand for illegal wares. Whether discussing the Russian mafia, Colombian drug cartels, or Chinese labor smugglers, Misha Glenny makes clear how organized crime feeds off the poverty of the developing world, how it exploits new technology in the forms of cybercrime and identity theft, and how both global crime and terror are fueled by an identical source: the triumphant material affluence of the West. To trace the disparate strands of this hydra-like story, Glenny talked to police, victims, politicians, and members of the global underworld in eastern Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, China, Japan, and India. The story of organized crime's phenomenal, often shocking growth is truly the central political story of our time. "McMafia "will change the way we look at the world.

    The author has tried to bridge the gap between historical research and popular perception of this controversial phase in Indian history.

    Seventy years after the historical march took place, Sun Shuyun set out to retrace the Marchers’ steps and unexpectedly discovered the true history behind the legend. The Long March is the stunning narrative of her extraordinary expedition. The facts are these: in 1934, in the midst of a brutal civil war, the Communist party and its 200,000 soldiers were forced from their bases by Chiang Kaishek and his Nationalist troops. After that, truth and legend begin to blur: led by Mao Zedong, the Communists set off on a strategic retreat to the distant barren north of China, thousands of miles away. Only one in five Marchers reached their destination, where, the legend goes, they gathered strength and returned to launch the new China in the heat of revolution.As Sun Shuyun journeys to remote villages along the Marchers’ route, she interviews the aged survivors and visits little-known local archives. She uncovers shocking stories of starvation, disease, and desertion, of ruthless purges ordered by party leaders, of the mistreatment of women, and of thousands of futile deaths. Many who survived the March report that their suffering continued long after the “triumph” of the revolution, recounting tales of persecution and ostracism that culminated in the horrific years of the Cultural Revolution. What emerges from Sun’s research, her interviews, and her own memories of growing up in China is a moving portrait of China past and present. Sun finds that the forces at work during the days of the revolution—the barren, unforgiving landscape; the unifying power of outside threats from foreign countries; Mao’s brilliant political instincts and his use of terror, propaganda, and ruthless purges to consolidate power and control the population—are the very forces that made China what it is today. The Long March is a gripping retelling of an amazing historical adventure, an eye-opening account of how Mao manipulated the event for his own purposes, and a beautiful document of a country balanced between legend and the truth.

     The facts of the tragedy are established: On April 15, 2013, two homemade bombs fashioned from pressure cookers exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding 264 others. The elder of the brothers suspected of committing this atrocity, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died in the ensuing manhunt; Dzhokhar will stand trial in January 2015. What we don’t know is why. How did such a nightmare come to pass?This is a probing and powerful story of dislocation, and the longing for clarity and identity that can reach the point of combustion. Bestselling Russian-American author Masha Gessen is uniquely endowed with the background, access, and talent to tell it. She explains who the brothers were and how they came to do what they appear to have done. From their displaced beginnings, as descendants of ethnic Chechens deported to Central Asia in the Stalin era, Gessen follows them as they are displaced again, from strife-ridden Kyrgyzstan to war-torn Dagestan, and then, as émigrés to the United States, into an utterly disorienting new world. Most crucially, she reconstructs the struggle between assimilation and alienation that ensued for each of the brothers, fueling their apparent metamorphosis into a new breed of homegrown terrorist, with their feet on American soil but their loyalties elsewhere—a split in identity that seems to have incubated a deadly sense of mission. Like Dave Cullen’s Columbine, this will be the enduring account of an indelible tragedy.

    Delicious.”—Maxine Hong Kingston The story of two women whose lives intersect in late-nineteenth-century Japan, The Teahouse Fire is also a portrait of one of the most fascinating places and times in all of history—Japan as it opens its doors to the West. It was a period when wearing a different color kimono could make a political statement, when women stopped blackening their teeth to profess an allegiance to Western ideas, and when Japan’s most mysterious rite—the tea ceremony—became not just a sacramental meal, but a ritual battlefield. We see it all through the eyes of Aurelia, an American orphan adopted by the Shin family, proprietors of a tea ceremony school, after their daughter, Yukako, finds her hiding on their grounds. Aurelia becomes Yukako’s closest companion, and they, the Shin family, and all of Japan face a time of great challenges and uncertainty. Told in an enchanting and unforgettable voice, The Teahouse Fire is a lively, provocative, and lushly detailed historical novel of epic scope and compulsive readability.

    In this reading of history, China and Japan, the kingdoms of India, Muslim caliphates, the Byzantine Empire and European maritime republics alike enjoyed no absolute dominance over their neighbours and commercial partners - and the egalitarian international trading network that they built endured until European advances in weaponry and ship types introduced radical instability to the system.Abu-Lughod's portrait of a more balanced world is a masterpiece of synthesis driven by one highly creative idea: her world system of interlocking spheres of influence quite literally connected masses of evidence together in new ways. A triumph of fine critical thinking.