The unwanted daughter of a concubine, she refused to have her feet bound, ran away to join an opera troupe and eventually met Mao Zedong in the mountains of Yenan.

    Their outrageous scheme provokes a series of crises involving the White House, the CIA, and a strangely sympathetic and vulnerable Chinese president, with both countries veering perilously towards war.Buckley has drawn his most convincing and outrageous characters to date: Bird, failed novelist of amusingly awful Clancy-esque thrillers; Angel, combination Anne Coulter and Ayn Rand; Bird's demanding, equestrian wife, Myndi; Bewks, his feckless but endearing Civil War re-enactor brother; the mild-mannered Chinese President Fa and his devoted aide Gang, maneuvering desperately against sinister Politburo hard-liners Minister Lo and General Han.Blending the skewering genius of Thank You for Smoking with Dr. Strangelove 's dark comedy, They Eat Puppies, Don't They? has something to offend — and amuse — everyone.

    It introduced Psephology to the eager Indian masses and used state-of-the-art tools to bring slick programming and made an instant connect with its audience. Prannoy Roy, one of the promoters was an instant hit with his earnest demeanor and sly smile. This is the story of how this dynamic young man ended up presiding over one of the most corrupt media houses in Indian history. The two Promoters of NDTV, along with key top management colluded over the years with government functionaries and politicians to break laws, evade taxes and deceive shareholders of a public listed company. All this obviously through political patronage and “wheeling-and-dealing” as part of the Lutyens club and how they created a biased public discourse for a select elite class. Multinational corporations such as General Electric wittingly or otherwise aided NDTV by investing $150 million into a shell company with zero employees and zero revenue! In the minds of the Indian citizen, there is a space and respect for media. Using the halo of journalism and under the garb of Freedom of Press, media owners misuse this position and in the end, degrade the values of journalism. On several occasions media became the tool of false propaganda, blackmailing and illegal money making with the blessing of uncouth politicians and corporate icons with hidden agendas. This ought to be exposed and that is the reason for this book.

    In this powerful and beautiful story, we follow a group of people in a small town during this dramatic and harrowing time, the era that was a forebear of the Tiananmen Square uprising.Morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River. A young woman, Gu Shan, a bold spirit and a follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism. Now a political prisoner, she is to be executed for her dissent. Her distraught mother, determined to follow the custom of burning her only child’s clothing to ease her journey into the next world, is about to make another bold decision. Shan’s father, Teacher Gu, who has already, in his heart and mind, buried his rebellious daughter, begins to retreat into memories. Neither of them imagines that their daughter’s death will have profound and far-reaching effects, in Muddy River and beyond.In luminous prose, Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of these and other unforgettable characters, including a serious seven-year-old boy, Tong; a crippled girl named Nini; the sinister idler Bashi; and Kai, a beautiful radio news announcer who is married to a man from a powerful family. Life in a world of oppression and pain is portrayed through stories of resilience, sacrifice, perversion, courage, and belief. We read of delicate moments and acts of violence by mothers, sons, husbands, neighbors, wives, lovers, and more, as Gu Shan’s execution spurs a brutal government reaction.Writing with profound emotion, and in the superb tradition of fiction by such writers as Orhan Pamuk and J. M. Coetzee, Yiyun Li gives us a stunning novel that is at once a picture of life in a special part of the world during a historic period, a universal portrait of human frailty and courage, and a mesmerizing work of art.

    Cool, eloquent, raising two fatherless children, Claire has emerged as the most visible of the widows who became a potent political force in the aftermath of the catastrophe. She longs for her husband, but she has found her mission: she sits on a jury charged with selecting a fitting memorial for the victims of the attack. Of the thousands of anonymous submissions that she and her fellow jurors examine, one transfixes Claire: a garden on whose walls the names of the dead are inscribed. But when the winning envelope is opened, they find the designer is Mohammad Khan - Mo - an enigmatic Muslim-American who, it seems, feels no need to represent anyone's beliefs except his own. When the design and its creator are leaked, a media firestorm erupts, and Claire finds herself trying to balance principles against emotions amid escalating tensions about the place of Islam in America.A remarkably bold and ambitious debut, The Submission is peopled with journalists, activists, mourners, and bureaucrats who struggle for advantage and fight for their ideals. In this deeply humane novel, the breadth of Amy Waldman's cast of characters is matched by her startling ability to conjure individual lives from their own points of view. A striking portrait of a city - and a country - fractured by old hatreds and new struggles, The Submission is a major novel by an important new talent.

    The Intellectual Devotional is a secular version of the same—a collection of 365 short lessons that will inspire and invigorate the reader every day of the year. Each daily digest of wisdom is drawn from one of seven fields of knowledge: history, literature, philosophy, mathematics and science, religion, fine arts, and music.Impress your friends by explaining Plato's Cave Allegory, pepper your cocktail party conversation with opera terms, and unlock the mystery of how batteries work. Daily readings range from important passages in literature to basic principles of physics, from pivotal events in history to images of famous paintings with accompanying analysis. The book's goal is to refresh knowledge we've forgotten, make new discoveries, and exercise modes of thinking that are ordinarily neglected once our school days are behind us. Offering an escape from the daily grind to contemplate higher things, The Intellectual Devotional is a great way to awaken in the morning or to revitalize one's mind before retiring in the evening.

    That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.The copying and translation of this ancient book—the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age—fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

    Starting with Ptolemy, "father of modern geography," and ending with satellite cartography, A History of the World in 12 Maps brings maps from classical Greece, Renaissance Europe, and the Islamic and Buddhist worlds to life and reveals their influence on how we—literally—look at our present world. As Brotton shows, the long road to our present geographical reality was rife with controversy, manipulation, and special interests trumping science. Through the centuries maps have been wielded to promote any number of imperial, religious, and economic agendas, and have represented the idiosyncratic and uneasy fusion of science and subjectivity. Brotton also conjures the worlds that produced these notable works of cartography and tells the stories of those who created, used, and misused them for their own ends.

    First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident." --Arthur SchopenhauerThe Ponzi Factor is the most comprehensive research ever compiled on the negative-sum nature of capital gains (non-dividend stocks). The book shows why, as a whole, ALL investors will lose money from buying and selling stocks.Most people don’t realize that profits from buying and selling stocks come from other investors who are also buying and selling stocks. When one investor buys low and sells high, another investor is also buying high and needs to sell for even higher. Companies like Google, Telsa, Facebook never pay their investors. Their investors’ profits are dependent on the inflow of money from new investors, which by definition, is how a Ponzi scheme works.This book is not for everyone. If you are a finance junkie who wants to rationalize why companies don’t have to pay their investors and believe a system that shuffles money between investor can magically create more money than people contribute, then this book is not for you. On the other hand, if you understand why we can’t create money by shuffling it with imaginary paper, and that investors invest because they want money, not value, then you will learn something you will never forget: The mechanics of how the stock market works and what really makes a stock price move.A stock without dividends is a Ponzi asset. It’s not how equity instruments were designed to work historically and not how ownership instruments are supposed to work logically. The Ponzi Factor is not a perspective or an opinion. It is a proof that is based on definition, logic, and it is supported by observable facts and history. This is not a story that will disappear after another market crash. It is an idea that will remain relevant for as long as the stock market exists.Lastly, to critics, the naysayer, and the finance junkies who think the imaginary value = cash. The author will award $20,000 to anyone who can show why non-dividend stocks DO NOT meet the definition of a Ponzi scheme. That’s $20,000 in cash, not value. (Details on this book's website. The Ponzi Factor. Proof by Definition.)

    Belief is a technology for softening the landscape. The world becomes more beautiful when God is in it. Here is what happens inside a person's body when they starve.Written in the shadow of Georg Buchner's Lenz at razor pitch, Aliens & Anorexia, first published in 2000, defines a female form of chance that is both emotional and radical. The book unfolds like a set of Chinese boxes, using stories and polemics to travel through a maze that spirals back into itself. Its characters include Simone Weil, the first radical philosopher of sadness, the artist Paul Thek, Kraus herself, and "Africa," her virtual S&M partner who's shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes up in the Northwest Woods for the winter to chronicle the failure of Gravity & Grace, her own low-budget independent film.In Aliens & Anorexia, Kraus argues for empathy as the ultimate perceptive tool, and reclaims anorexia from the psychoanalytic girl-ghetto of poor "self-esteem." Anorexia, Kraus writes, could be an attempt to leave the body altogether: a rejection of the cynicism this culture hands us through its food.

    What threw me, though, was the urgency of the diplomats in Beijing. They live it, they get it. And they wanted me out.'Bill Birtles was rushed out of China in September 2020, forced to seek refuge in the Australian Embassy in Beijing while diplomats delicately negotiated his departure in an unprecedented standoff with China's government. Five days later he was on a flight back to Sydney, leaving China without any Australian foreign correspondents on the ground for the first time in decades.A journalist's perspective on this rising global power has never been more important, as Australia's relationship with China undergoes an extraordinary change that's seen the detention of a journalist Cheng Lei, Canberra's criticism of Beijing's efforts to crush Hong Kong's freedoms, as well as China's military activity in the South China Sea and its human rights violations targeting the mostly Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang province. Chronicling his five-year stint in China as he criss-crossed the country, Birtles reveals why the historic unravelling of China's relations with the West is perceived very differently inside the country.The Truth About China is a compelling and candid examination of China, one that takes a magnifying glass to recent events, and looks through a telescope at what is yet to come.

    The throne he believes he is owed. But long before he became "Killmonger," there was a boy known as N'Jadaka. A boy who was stolen from his home and taught only the world's cruelties. A boy who knew the Black Panther only as a fairy tale, a whisper from strangers. This is the story of a man who is driven by revenge. This is the legend of Killmonger.

    There he meets the eminent professor, Gordon Stone, and his beautiful wife, Judith Silver, with whom he soon falls into a passionate affair. Into this explosive mix, a young woman appears--a single mother at the end of her emotional rope. Crystal desperately needs David. Yet caught between two women, David bears witness to a heartbreaking turn of events that seems as inevitable as the push and pull of ocean waves. . . .

    Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings? His bright blue coat and yellow boots seem out-of-place with the grandeur of the rest of the narrative. In this book, C.R. Wiley shows that Tom is not an afterthought but Tolkien's way of making a profoundly important point. Tolkien once wrote, "[Tom Bombadil] represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function." Tom Bombadil and his wife Goldberry are a small glimpse of the perfect beauty, harmony, and happy ending that we all yearn for in our hearts. To understand Tom Bombadil is to understand more of Tolkien and his deeply Christian vision of the world."