Leanna Adams moved to China in 2006, was nearly robbed, held her co-worker’s hand as she died in a filthy, smoke-filled hospital, bonded with many of her three hundred students and left part of her heart in Wuhu, China. Adams’s contrasting experiences highlight the differences that make the two cultures unique and the similarities that make all people human.

    Shanghai Station is a compelling tale of political terror and personal vengeance that unfolds in 1918 in China's colorful, turbulent port city of Shanghai. Well-born Alexander Karlov arrives in Shanghai with a mission, for the Bolsheviks have brutally killed his mother and abducted his twin sister. Vengeance commands Alexander's soul. It also entangles him in perilous allianceswith the Cossack hit man Ivan Semyonov; with Mei-lan, a woman who knows Shanghai's darkest secrets; with "Big Ear," leader of the city's most powerful Triad; with the French police; and with a spirited young American woman who calls herself Jesse James."

    Chi Lin becomes the Fourth Wife – the ghost bride in the House of Wu, a respectable Ming Dynasty household. But to keep her honor, Chi Lin assumes her role under the stern command of her mother-in-law and the disdainful eye of the First Wife. Still, as Mistress Purple Sage, Chi Lin survives, managing to bring fresh breath into this ancient household. Women in Fourteenth Century China played a subservient role. Most accepted their lot and worked within a man’s world, supporting their husbands, revering their fathers and elders, and assuring their children followed the same dauntless path. Still, within the narrow confines of a subservient life, there was always a place to leave a mark and make a difference for the future.Master Wu’s Bride is a journey seen from a woman’s point of view — a woman who held secrets and cultivated them to everyone’s advantage. From yesterday’s stale cabbage, Chi Lin manages to cultivate her world to bloom. Come take this journey with Mistress Purple Sage, the ghost bride. Come take this journey that many women in a host of cultures still take today in the shadow of inequality’s quagmire.

    It is not just a fictional story of the events that ripped one family apart, but a taste of Malaysia's historical political and cultural changes during its transition from colonial rule to independence and beyond.

    With Iris and Matthew as my guides, I would virtually and literally go anywhere." —Becky Selengut, author of Shroom: Mind-bendingly Good Recipes for Cultivated and Wild Mushrooms Seattle food writer Matthew Amster-Burton grew up on Chinese-American food. One day, he decided to take his ten-year-old daughter out for Chinese…in Hong Kong. Join two adventurous eaters as they explore night markets, hawker centers, gargatuan malls, and a fancy dim sum palace, all while living out their food fantasy: spending a week without having to eat anything other than Chinese food. Along with Matthew and Iris, you’ll: • Ride the world’s most exhilarating form of public transportation • Eat crispy rice, egg tarts, Hong Kong French toast, and a spicy chicken dish with more chiles than chicken • Hang out with locals (human and feline) • Discover Iris’s supervillain lair, high above the city Featuring two dozen color photos, Child Octopus is the first installment in a new series of short ebooks about Asian food and travel. We’re not experts. We just got here. And we’re hungry.

    Readers will learn essential skills like how to haggle, exchange currencies, cross the street, decipher menus, say useful phrases in Chinese, and more. The guide comes complete with survival tips on etiquette, a map, and resource lists. Don’t leave home for China without it!Veteran travelers Qin and Larry Herzberg are Chinese language and culture professors at Calvin College in Michigan.

    With the help of twenty-eight staff members of the Naisbitt China Institute in Tianjin, they have monitored local newspapers in all of China's provinces to identify the evolving perspectives and deep forces underlying China's transformation. Their research reveals that China is not only undergoing fundamental changes but also creating an entirely new social and economic model—what the Naisbitts call a "vertical democracy"—that is changing the rules of global trade and challenging Western democracy as the only acceptable form of governing.The Naisbitts have identified 8 pillars as the foundation and drivers of China's new society:Emancipation of the MindBalancing Top-Down and Bottom-UpFraming the Forest and Letting the Trees GrowCrossing the River by Feeling the StonesArtistic and Intellectual FermentJoining the WorldFreedom and FairnessFrom Olympic Medals to Nobel PrizesExamining each of these 8 pillars in great detail, China's Megatrends describes the new China for the knowledgeable and the newly curious, offering fresh and provocative insights and lessons to be learned.

    From San Francisco to Amsterdam to Bangkok to Johannesburg, everywhere, everyday, the Triads are turning crimes like extortion, gambling, international prostitution, illegal immigrant smuggling, money laundering, fraud, corruption, arms, and narcotics into vast profits. This comprehensive history of the Triads traces their evolution over more than two thousand years from obscure parochial Chinese brotherhoods to an international criminal organization. It examines the archaic quasi-religious rituals that have for centuries bound the members of this now global fraternity. It recounts the exploits of patriots and outlaws. It explores the Triads' instigation of the Tong Wars in America, their collaboration with the Allies against the Japanese in Malaya, their collusion with the CIA in Vietnam. It chronicles their escalation of the heroin trade to Europe and the United States. It shocks, and it compels.

    

    To their astonishment, they found they had landed in the heart of Tibet. There they had to confront what, to them, seemed a bizarre--even alien--people. At the same time, they had to extricate themselves from the political turmoil that even then was raging around Tibet's right to be independent from China.Now back in print, Lost in Tibet is an extraordinary story of high adventure that sheds light on the remarkable Tibetan people, just at the moment when they were coming to terms with a hostile outside world.

    In his memoir, Maybe I Should Just Shut Up And Go Away, he looks back across the decades and shares the often-hilarious reality of what happens behind the scenes when you re a talk radio icon. Longtime friend with national radio greats Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, he tells how those relationships began in the hot seat of competition. Tributes are included from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Home Depot Founder Bernie Marcus and 2012 presidential nominee Herman Cain. Though early predictions by those who knew him in his youth cast Boortz as a sure prospect to become a preacher, he took a different route to educating the masses. Longtime listeners are certain to become enthusiastic readers as Boortz finally tips his hat to more than four decades of teeing up controversy, political education and general entertainment for audiences across the country to enjoy and tells all they ve been wanting to know but couldn t get anyone to share until now."

    China's challenge to the West stems from its transformative brand of capitalism and an entirely different conception of the international community.Taking us on a whirlwind tour of China in the world—from dictators in Africa to oligarchs in Southeast Asia to South American strongmen—Halper demonstrates that China's illiberal vision is rapidly replacing that of the so-called Washington Consensus. Instead of promoting democracy through economic aid, as does the West, China offers no-strings-attached gifts and loans, a policy designed to build a new Beijing Consensus.The autonomy China offers, together with the appeal of its illiberal capitalism, have become the dual engines for the diffusion of power away from the West. The Beijing Consensus is the one book to read to understand this new Great Game in all its complexity.

    One weekend, Mark escapes to Moganshan, a dilapidated mountaintop village built by foreigners in the early 1900s as a summer retreat. Mark falls in love with the place and decides to restore one of the villas, as if he were in Tuscany or Provence.

    Their choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas, and concrete. To understand world events, news organizations and other authorities often focus on people, ideas, and political movements, but without geography, we never have the full picture. Now, in the relevant and timely Prisoners of Geography, seasoned journalist Tim Marshall examines Russia, China, the USA, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Japan and Korea, and Greenland and the Arctic—their weather, seas, mountains, rivers, deserts, and borders—to provide a context often missing from our political reportage: how the physical characteristics of these countries affect their strengths and vulnerabilities and the decisions made by their leaders.In ten, up-to-date maps of each region, Marshall explains in clear and engaging prose the complex geo-political strategies of these key parts of the globe. What does it mean that Russia must have a navy, but also has frozen ports six months a year? How does this affect Putin’s treatment of Ukraine? How is China’s future constrained by its geography? Why will Europe never be united? Why will America never be invaded? Shining a light on the unavoidable physical realities that shape all of our aspirations and endeavors, Prisoners of Geography is the critical guide to one of the major (and most often overlooked) determining factors in world history.

    For nearly two months, he was held by North Korea’s fearsome security services, subjected to intensive interrogation, and repeatedly warned that if he did not confess his “crimes,” he might never be allowed to return home. In visiting the North, Newman was returning for a final glimpse of the country where he served a half century earlier. Perhaps naively- and in sharp contrast to America’s former enemies Japan, Germany, and Vietnam - he did not realize that for the North Koreans, the war had never ended. His role in 1953 as a U.S. military adviser to the “Kuwol Comrades”-- anti-communist Korean guerrillas who fought behind North Korean lines -- convinced a paranoid North Korean regime that despite his age, his heart condition, and the passage of time, Newman was a dangerous “enemy” agent. "The Last POW" is the exclusive account of Newman’s ordeal -- how the North Koreans tried, without success, to break his will; his interactions with his sinister interrogator and the other North Koreans involved in his detention; the "confession" he was forced to broadcast, and how he tried to signal he was being coerced. While Merrill was detained in Pyongyang, his family -- his wife Lee, living in a retirement home in Palo Alto, and his son and daughter-in-law in Pasadena -- were frantically trying to determine what had happened to him and what they could do to secure his freedom. Newman’s detention became a symbol of the seemingly irreconcilable differences that keep North Korea and the U.S. in a permanent state of tension, and revealed the inner workings of the security apparatus of one of the world’s most totalitarian states. Eventually, his case would involve the State Department, the international news media, eccentric former basketball player Dennis Rodman, and possibly North Korean leader Kim Jong Un himself. His story serves as a warning against underestimating the lengths to which a paranoid and secretive regime will go to defend what it perceives as a threat to its security or reputation. But it is also an inspiring tale of an ordinary American family’s courage and resilience in a situation as frightening as it was bizarre. Mike Chinoy is a Senior Fellow at the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California. He previously spent 24 years as a foreign correspondent for CNN, serving as Bureau Chief in Beijing and Hong Kong, and as Senior Asia Correspondent.. He is the author of "Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis," and "China Live: People Power and the Television Revolution." He his visited North Korea 17 times. Cover design by Evan Twohy.