The most authoritative life of the Chinese leader every written, Mao: The Unknown Story is based on a decade of research, and on interviews with many of Mao’s close circle in China who have never talked before — and with virtually everyone outside China who had significant dealings with him. It is full of startling revelations, exploding the myth of the Long March, and showing a completely unknown Mao: he was not driven by idealism or ideology; his intimate and intricate relations...

Douglas Sirk is one of the most neglected directors in American cinema. This book aims to rectify that and, through a survey of his career, to re-establish Sirk as one of the great stylists of Hollywood cinema.In 1937 Sirk left Germany, after a successful career in theatre and film, and came to Hollywood. From 1942 to 1958 he directed some 30 films, the most famous of which were a series of lush melodramas in the '50s, which were seen at the time as vehicles for stars such as Rock ...

“Ever since the spectacular success of Chang’s Wild Swans we have waited impatiently for her to complete with her husband this monumental study of China’s most notorious modern leader. The expectation has been that she would rewrite modern Chinese history. The wait has been worthwhile and the expectation justified. This is a bombshell of a book.”–Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, in The Times (London)Based on a decade of research and on intervie...

The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author.An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraord...

In the tradition of the great narrative storytellers, Andrei Cherny recounts the exhilarating saga of the unlikely men who made the Berlin Airlift one of the great military and humanitarian successes of American history.The Candy Bombers is a remarkable story with profound implications for our own time. Cherny tells the tale of the ill-assorted group of castoffs and second-stringers who not only saved millions of desperate people from a dire threat, but also won the hearts of Ameri...

In 1994, Anchee Min made her literary debut with a memoir of growing up in China during the violent trauma of the Cultural Revolution. Red Azalea became an international bestseller and propelled her career as a successful, critically acclaimed author. Twenty years later, Min returns to the story of her own life to give us the next chapter, an immigrant story that takes her from the shocking deprivations of her homeland to the sudden bounty of the promised land of America, without language,...

An entertaining, accessible guide to Elizabethan England—the latest in the Time Traveler’s Guide seriesAcclaimed historian Ian Mortimer shows readers that the past is not just something to be studied; it is also something to be lived. Using diaries, letters, books, and other writings of the day, Mortimer offers a masterful portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, re-creating the sights, sounds, and customs ofthe sixteenth century from the perspective of both peasants a...

When the murder of a woman is reported to the Shanghai police while Inspector Chen is on vacation, Sergeant Yu is forced to take charge of the investigation. The victim, Yin Lige, a novelist known for her banned book, has been found dead in her tiny, humble room off the stairwell of a converted multi-family house. It seems that only a neighbor could have committed the crime, for the building is kept locked at night. But there is no apparent motive. Sergeant Yu tries to unravel the reclusiv...

It's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great Depression. Only through the stories of the common people who struggled during that era can we really understand how the nation endured. In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. Rejecting the old emphasis on the New Deal, she turns to the neglected and moving stories of individual Americans, and shows how they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as...

“The most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America . . . a great American novel.”— James Atlas, The Atlantic MonthlyFrom acclaimed author Russell Banks, a masterful novel of hope lost and gained—a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.Banks's searing tale of uprootedness, migration, and explo...

John Burdett's Bangkok series, featuring Royal Thai Police Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, has a reputation for being simultaneously morbid and witty. In Vulture Peak, Sonchai is tasked with ending human organ trafficking in Thailand. Before long he's wrapped up with a cast of characters that includes a washed-up rock star and a pair of Chinese twins known as the Vultures. And to complicate matters even further, Sonchai must also battle his ever-increasing suspicions that his ex-prostitute...

Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery, The Orientalist traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best-selling author in Nazi Germany.Born in 1905 to a wealthy family in the oil-boom city of Baku, at the edge of the czarist empire, Lev escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan. He found refuge in Germany, where, writing under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, his remarkable books ...