Download or read book Imperial Twilight written by Stephen R. Platt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.
Download or read book Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom written by Stephen R. Platt and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping account of China's nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles--a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China. The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a failed civil servant who claimed to be the son of God and brother of Jesus. The Taiping rebels drew their power from the poor and the disenfranchised, unleashing the ethnic rage of millions of Chinese against their Manchu rulers. This homegrown movement seemed all but unstoppable until Britain and the United States stepped in and threw their support behind the Manchus: after years of massive carnage, all opposition to Qing rule was effectively snuffed out for generations. Stephen R. Platt recounts these events in spellbinding detail, building his story on two fascinating characters with opposing visions for China's future: the conservative Confucian scholar Zeng Guofan, an accidental general who emerged as the most influential military strategist in China's modern history; and Hong Rengan, a brilliant Taiping leader whose grand vision of building a modern, industrial, and pro-Western Chinese state ended in tragic failure. This is an essential and enthralling history of the rise and fall of the movement that, a century and a half ago, might have launched China on an entirely different path into the modern world.
Download or read book The Twilight of Imperial Russia written by Richard Charques and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fateful twenty-three years following the accession of the last of the Romanov Tsars formed the prologue to the Russian Revolution, and foreshadowed the motives and mental attitudes of Russian policy today. Richard Charques’s detailed, vivid, and objective account of the reign of Nicholas II is based upon a wide study of Russian and other sources. It is given particular force and liveliness by the portrait gallery of the leading figures of the period; Nicholas II, the Tsaritsa Alexandra, Constantine Pobedonostsev, Sergius Witte, Lenin, Trotsky, Premier Stolypin, Miluikov, and Rasputin. “Striking phrases, fine judgments, flashes of deep perception, flicker through these pages, illuminating the sad, sombre story, which Mr. Charques is not afraid to extend, by implication, into the present.”—Observer (London) “Informative and well written, and the story of the last phase of the Romanovs is...movingly told.”—New Statesman (London) “Mr. Charques writes with great lucidity and elegance; he has also unusual discernment, a healthy sense of historical reality, and a penetrating mind...Scrupulously fair.”—Times Educational Supplement (London) “An uncommonly good book about the decline and fall of the Russian empire—lucid, incisive, well balanced, and extremely well written.”—Chicago Sunday Tribune
Download or read book Imperial Twilight written by Eric Thomson and published by Sanddiver Books Inc.. This book was released on 2019 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most powerful empire in human history is rushing headlong toward destruction, ending our species’ supremacy in the known galaxy. Two men with widely divergent visions are on a mission to save civilization in at least one sector, far from the imperial capital where a demented ruler holds sway. The first, Jonas Morane, wants to create an impregnable vault containing humanity’s accumulated knowledge so those who survive the coming darkness can rebuild in decades instead of millennia. The other, Devy Custis, seeks to fend off collapse by founding a new empire in the Coalsack Sector, one free of the madness that caused this civil war. But will either resist the ravages of a genocidal empress, blood-maddened barbarians, and scheming admirals? Unfortunately, the vicissitudes of fate, abetted by greed and lust for power, could destroy both before they make their dreams a reality. Imperial Twilight is the second installment in Eric Thomson’s saga Ashes of Empire, the story of a desperate attempt to preserve one last spark of civilization so that humanity does not vanish from the galaxy. Keyword Tags: galactic empire, sci-fi, science fiction, military science fiction, war, strong female character, space opera, science fiction action adventure, alien invasion, starfleet, space fleet, sci-fi adventure, military sci-fi, Eric Thomson, science fiction series, interstellar war, galactic war, space pirates, mercenaries
Download or read book Imperial Twilight written by Stephen R. Platt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.
Download or read book Twilight in the Forbidden City written by Reginald F. Johnston and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johnson's account of the last years of the Chinese Qing dynasty provides a unique Western perspective on this historic period.
Download or read book Imperial Twilight The Story of Karl and Zita of Hungary written by Bertita Harding and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The start of World War I is seen as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria but who came after him in the line of succession. This is fascinating historical love story of the couple thrust into the limelight of the most turbulent years in European history. Karl and Zita would become the rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire but it was a royal family doomed to fail. An in-depth and gripping story that is often overlooked in the vast archive of work on the First World War.
Download or read book Count Sergei Witte and the Twilight of Imperial Russia written by Sidney Harcave and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-08 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sergei Witte served as finance minister and later prime minister of Russia during the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II, and was in large part responsible for the development policies which saw Russia transformed from a peasant economy into an industrial nation. This is the first biography of Witte in English.
Download or read book Imperial Sunset written by Eric Thomson and published by Sanddiver Books Inc.. This book was released on 2018 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanity's thousand-year-old interstellar empire has been rotting from the inside for over a century, thanks to venal, corrupt, and power-hungry sovereigns from a dynasty many consider illegitimate. The latest in that lineage, an increasingly psychotic empress, is pushing her realm toward catastrophic collapse as admirals and generals rebel against her rule. That rebellion quickly drags the once mighty Imperial Fleet into a devastating fratricidal conflict between factions. With civil war raging across human space, a Navy torn asunder can no longer protect frontier colonies, and barbarians long confined to the galactic badlands see an opportunity. After generations of hard existence on worlds beyond the bounds of human civilization, they hold life cheap, especially that of others. The barbarians will gladly steal everything they find and condemn defenseless star systems to technological and demographic collapse. That is if they don't wipe them out entirely from sheer bloodlust or by selling survivors on alien slave markets. One man, Captain Jonas Morane of the cruiser Vanquish, saw the empire's collapse coming years before the first admiral rebelled. When he finds himself the senior surviving officer of a loyalist Navy unit almost entirely annihilated by rebels, Morane puts in motion a plan he developed long ago. This plan was designed to not only save his ships and crews from certain death but keep humanity's accumulated knowledge from being obliterated by the long night of barbarism. However, before his dream can become a reality, Morane must lead the remains of the 197th Imperial Battle Group through an intricate wormhole network across a shattered empire, dodging his former colleagues from both sides, to the sanctuary he selected. Along the way, he rescues an Imperial Marine Corps Pathfinder battalion and the survivors of a religious order known for its mysticism from certain death, and enlists them in his cause. But will Morane's sanctuary survive both the flames of rebellion and the depredations of invading marauders before his rag-tag fleet can reach it? Imperial Sunset is the first installment in Eric Thomson's new saga Ashes of Empire. It tells the story of a desperate attempt to stave off the darkness threatening to smother humanity's interstellar empire and send civilization back to the Stone Age. Ashes of Empire is set in the Siobhan Dunmoore, Decker's War, and Quis Custodiet universe, but a thousand years after Zack Decker and Caelin Morrow's day, when they and Siobhan Dunmoore have become no more than minor footnotes in human history.
Download or read book An Imperial Twilight written by Sir Gawain Bell and published by Lester Crook Academic Pub.. This book was released on 1989 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text looks at colonial administration in the British colonies.
Download or read book The Opium Wars written by W Travis Hanes III, Ph.D. and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2004-02-01 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating look at the other side of the Opium Wars In this tragic and powerful story, the two Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860 between Britain and China are recounted for the first time through the eyes of the Chinese as well as the Imperial West. Opium entered China during the Middle Ages when Arab traders brought it into China for medicinal purposes. As it took hold as a recreational drug, opium wrought havoc on Chinese society. By the early nineteenth century, 90 percent of the Emperor's court and the majority of the army were opium addicts. Britain was also a nation addicted—to tea, grown in China, and paid for with profits made from the opium trade. When China tried to ban the use of the drug and bar its Western smugglers from it gates, England decided to fight to keep open China's ports for its importation. England, the superpower of its time, managed to do so in two wars, resulting in a drug-induced devastation of the Chinese people that would last 150 years. In this page-turning, dramatic and colorful history, The Opium Wars responds to past, biased Western accounts by representing the neglected Chinese version of the story and showing how the wars stand as one of the monumental clashes between the cultures of East and West. "A fine popular account."—Publishers Weekly "Their account of the causes, military campaigns and tragic effects of these wars is absorbing, frequently macabre and deeply unsettling."—Booklist
Download or read book The Opium War written by Julia Lovell and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “crisp and readable account” of the nineteenth century British campaign sheds light on modern Chinese identity through “a heartbreaking story of war” (The Wall Street Journal). In October 1839, a Windsor cabinet meeting voted to begin the first Opium War against China. Bureaucratic fumbling, military missteps, and a healthy dose of political opportunism and collaboration followed. Rich in tragicomedy, The Opium War explores the disastrous British foreign-relations move that became a founding myth of modern Chinese nationalism, and depicts China’s heroic struggle against Western conspiracy. Julia Lovell examines the causes and consequences of the Opium War, interweaving tales of the opium pushers and dissidents. More importantly, she analyses how the Opium Wars shaped China’s self-image and created an enduring model for its interactions with the West, plagued by delusion and prejudice.
Download or read book Rasputin written by Douglas Smith and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the centenary of the death of Rasputin comes a definitive biography that will dramatically change our understanding of this fascinating figure A hundred years after his murder, Rasputin continues to excite the popular imagination as the personification of evil. Numerous biographies, novels, and films recount his mysterious rise to power as Nicholas and Alexandra's confidant and the guardian of the sickly heir to the Russian throne. His debauchery and sinister political influence are the stuff of legend, and the downfall of the Romanov dynasty was laid at his feet. But as the prizewinning historian Douglas Smith shows, the true story of Rasputin's life and death has remained shrouded in myth. A major new work that combines probing scholarship and powerful storytelling, Rasputin separates fact from fiction to reveal the real life of one of history's most alluring figures. Drawing on a wealth of forgotten documents from archives in seven countries, Smith presents Rasputin in all his complexity--man of God, voice of peace, loyal subject, adulterer, drunkard. Rasputin is not just a definitive biography of an extraordinary and legendary man but a fascinating portrait of the twilight of imperial Russia as it lurched toward catastrophe.
Download or read book Twilight on the Zambezi written by E. Herbert and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-09-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at Central Africa in the moment before the collapse of British colonial authority. Beginning with a lively study of Northern Rhodesia, the book moves outward in widening circles to the views of native councils, of colonial leaders, of African campaigners for independence, and ultimately of the Colonial Office in London. The result is a prismatic glimpse of the complexities of decolonization in Africa. Based on a rich assortment of unpublished documents, the book focuses on the key year of 1959, the year before the British government's actions that turned the tide toward independence. Rich in historical detail and conflicting perspectives, the book provides new insight into the complex particularities of local colonial history.
Download or read book Twilight of the Empire written by Simon R. Green and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this trilogy set in the Deathstalker universe, the New York Times–bestselling author delivers “lots of action” and “exotic dangers” (Science Fiction Chronicle). Gathered here into a single volume, the novels in Simon R. Green’s Twilight of the Empire series take place before Owen Deathstalker’s rebellion in the same universe. An empire that once peacefully united galaxies in harmony is now rotten with corruption and ruled by a mad empress, threatened by outside alien invasion and violent internal rebellion. Against this background, “Green moves his plot at top speed” and delivers action-packed adventures set on three different worlds (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine). Mistworld: A rebel planet, cut off from the fruits of the Empire by a punishing blockade, Mistworld is a refuge for criminals, traitors, and exiles. Under a harsh medieval order, the strong rule, the weak perish, and everyone steals. A legendary Siren, possessed of terrible mental powers, Investigator Topaz is one of the few honest ones left. And when the Empire attempts to attack the psionic shield that protects Mistworld, she is the only one who can save them, whether they deserve it or not . . . Ghostworld: Ten years ago, the indigenous people of Unseeli rose up in rebellion against the Empire. Captain John Silence led the massacre that left the natives extinct and the planet uninhabited, except for the engineers who mine its invaluable metals. But when communication is abruptly cut off from the mining settlement, Captain Silence must return to find out what’s gone wrong—and confront the ghosts that still haunt his nightmares . . . Hellworld: Disgraced naval officer Scott Hunter is given a choice: get drummed out of the Imperial starfleet or join a suicide mission with the Hell Squad. One-way planetary scouts, the Hell Squad is made up of outcasts who explore new worlds for colonization. They survive or they die, but they never come back. Hunter leads a motley team of hard-nosed rebels to the volcano planet of Wolf IV, where they discover an ancient city and awaken a race of aliens. And now it’s kill or be killed . . .
Download or read book The Twilight World written by Werner Herzog and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-06-13 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A potent, vaporous fever dream; a meditation on truth, lie, illusion, and time that floats like an aromatic haze through Herzog’s vivid reconstruction of Onoda’s war.” —The New York Times Book Review The national bestseller by the great filmmaker Werner Herzog. The great filmmaker Werner Herzog, in his first novel, tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War II In 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts asked him, Whom would you like to meet? He replied instantly: Hiroo Onoda. Onoda was a former soldier famous for having quixotically defended an island in the Philippines for decades after World War II, unaware the fighting was over. Herzog and Onoda developed an instant rapport and met many times, talking and unraveling the story of Onoda’s long war. At the end of 1944 on Lubang Island, with Japanese troops about to withdraw, Onoda stayed behind under orders from his superior officer. For years, Onoda continued to fight his fictitious war—at first with other soldiers, and then, finally, alone, a character in a novel of his own making. In The Twilight World, Herzog immortalizes and imagines Onoda’s years of absurd yet epic struggle in an inimitable, hypnotic style—part documentary, part poem, and part dream—that will be instantly recognizable to fans of his films. The result is a novel completely unto itself: a glowing, dancing meditation on the purpose and meaning we give our lives.
Download or read book Unlikely Partners written by Julian Gewirtz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlikely Partners recounts the story of how Chinese politicians and intellectuals looked beyond their country’s borders for economic guidance at a key crossroads in the nation’s tumultuous twentieth century. Julian Gewirtz offers a dramatic tale of competition for influence between reformers and hardline conservatives during the Deng Xiaoping era, bringing to light China’s productive exchanges with the West. When Mao Zedong died in 1976, his successors seized the opportunity to reassess the wisdom of China’s rigid commitment to Marxist doctrine. With Deng Xiaoping’s blessing, China’s economic gurus scoured the globe for fresh ideas that would put China on the path to domestic prosperity and ultimately global economic power. Leading foreign economists accepted invitations to visit China to share their expertise, while Chinese delegations traveled to the United States, Hungary, Great Britain, West Germany, Brazil, and other countries to examine new ideas. Chinese economists partnered with an array of brilliant thinkers, including Nobel Prize winners, World Bank officials, battle-scarred veterans of Eastern Europe’s economic struggles, and blunt-speaking free-market fundamentalists. Nevertheless, the push from China’s senior leadership to implement economic reforms did not go unchallenged, nor has the Chinese government been eager to publicize its engagement with Western-style innovations. Even today, Chinese Communists decry dangerous Western influences and officially maintain that China’s economic reinvention was the Party’s achievement alone. Unlikely Partners sets forth the truer story, which has continuing relevance for China’s complex and far-reaching relationship with the West.
