Download or read book Soulful Echoes The Tale of Two Xiangyangs written by Sky Rainbow and published by Austin Macauley Publishers. This book was released on 2024-03-28 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When historian Manro Lu travels to China to uncover a mysterious family heirloom, she discovers much more than ancient secrets. There, she crosses paths with handsome professor Jafung Yu, sparking an unexpected yet undeniable attraction. Linked by a broken 800-year-old jade pendant, Manro and Jafung find themselves inexplicably drawn together as they piece together clues about the artifact’s past owners - two forbidden lovers separated by war. Emotions intensify amid quiet moments on scenic bridges and candlelit ancient temples. Yet with so much history and baggage in Manro’s delicate mission, what future can two young romantics share when the past pulls them apart? From the picturesque rivers of Xiangyang Shire to the bustling streets of Xiangyang City, experience the blooming passion between a Korean expatriate and a local Chinese scholar. Two hearts brought together by a name and torn asunder by time find that love can bridge more than culture, generations, wars, and broken pendants.
Download or read book Tobacco Record written by and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 794 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Chimes written by Anna Smaill and published by Quercus. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A HIGHLY ORIGINAL DYSTOPIAN MASTERPIECE" --Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winning author of March "FOR ALL THE POETRY AND LYRICISM, THE CHIMES IS A SOLID SUSPENSEFUL ADVENTURE STORY AT HEART" --NPR Books A mind-expanding literary debut composed of memory, music and imagination. A boy stands on the roadside on his way to London, alone in the rain. No memories, beyond what he can hold in his hands at any given moment. No directions, as written words have long since been forbidden. No parents--just a melody that tugs at him, a thread to follow. A song that says if he can just get to the capital, he may find some answers about what happened to them. The world around Simon sings, each movement a pulse of rhythm, each object weaving its own melody, music ringing in every drop of air. Welcome to the world of The Chimes. Here, life is orchestrated by a vast musical instrument that renders people unable to form new memories. The past is a mystery, each new day feels the same as the last, and before is blasphony. But slowly, inexplicably, Simon is beginning to remember. He emerges from sleep each morning with a pricking feeling, and sense there is something he urgently has to do. In the city Simon meets Lucien, who has a gift for hearing, some secrets of his own, and a theory about the danger lurking in Simon's past. A stunning debut composed of memory, music, love and freedom, The Chimes pulls you into a world that will captivate, enthrall and inspire.
Download or read book Ping Pong Diplomacy written by Nicholas Griffin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining the insight of Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World and the intrigue of Ben Affleck’s Argo, Ping Pong Diplomacy traces the story of how an aristocratic British spy used the game of table tennis to propel a Communist strategy that changed the shape of the world. THE SPRING OF 1971 heralded the greatest geopolitical realignment in a generation. After twenty-two years of antagonism, China and the United States suddenly moved toward a détente—achieved not by politicians but by Ping-Pong players. The Western press delighted in the absurdity of the moment and branded it “Ping-Pong Diplomacy.” But for the Chinese, Ping-Pong was always political, a strategic cog in Mao Zedong’s foreign policy. Nicholas Griffin proves that the organized game, from its first breath, was tied to Communism thanks to its founder, Ivor Montagu, son of a wealthy English baron and spy for the Soviet Union. Ping-Pong Diplomacy traces a crucial intersection of sports and society. Griffin tells the strange and tragic story of how the game was manipulated at the highest levels; how the Chinese government helped cover up the death of 36 million peasants by holding the World Table Tennis Championships during the Great Famine; how championship players were driven to their deaths during the Cultural Revolution; and, finally, how the survivors were reconvened in 1971 and ordered to reach out to their American counterparts. Through a cast of eccentric characters, from spies to hippies and Ping-Pong-obsessed generals to atom-bomb survivors, Griffin explores how a neglected sport was used to help realign the balance of worldwide power.
Download or read book Family Furnishings written by Alice Munro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extraordinary collection” (San Francisco Chronicle) of twenty-four short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro. “Superb . . . Munro is a writer to be cherished.”—NPR A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Minneapolis Star Tribune A selection of Alice Munro’s most accomplished and powerfully affecting short fiction from 1995 to 2014, these stories encompass the fullness of human experience, from the wild exhilaration of first love (in “Passion”) to the punishing consequences of leaving home (“Runaway”) or ending a marriage (“The Children Stay”). And in stories that Munro has described as “closer to the truth than usual”—“Dear Life,” “Working for a Living,” and “Home”—we glimpse the author’s own life. Subtly honed with her hallmark precision, grace, and compassion, these stories illuminate the quotidian yet astonishing particularities in the lives of men and women, parents and children, friends and lovers as they discover sex, fall in love, part, quarrel, suffer defeat, set off into the unknown, or find a way to be in the world.
Download or read book The Matchmaker the Apprentice and the Football Fan written by Wen Zhu and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan moves between anarchic campuses, maddening communist factories, and the victims of China's economic miracle to showcase the absurdity, injustice, and socialist Gothic of everyday Chinese life. In "The Football Fan," readers fall in with an intriguingly unreliable narrator who may or may not have killed his elderly neighbor for a few hundred yuan. The bemused antihero of "Reeducation" is appalled to discover that, ten years after graduating during the pro-democracy protests of 1989, his alma mater has summoned him back for a punitive bout of political reeducation with a troublesome ex-girlfriend. "Da Ma's Way of Talking" is a fast, funny recollection of China's picaresque late 1980s, told through the life and times of one of our student narrator's more controversial classmates; while "The Apprentice" plunges us into the comic vexations of life in a more-or-less planned economy, as an enthusiastic young graduate is over-exercised by his table-tennis-fanatic bosses, deprived of sleep by gambling-addicted colleagues, and stuffed with hard-boiled eggs by an overzealous landlady. Full of acute observations, political bite, and piercing insight into friendships and romance, these stories further establish Zhu Wen as a fearless commentator on human nature and contemporary China.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo written by John Garnaut and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo is a shocking and revelatory exposé of China's most controversial 'statesman' Bo Xilai, by journalist John Garnaut, available exclusively as a digital-only Penguin Special. When news of the murder trial of prominent Communist Party leader Bo Xilai's wife reached Western attention, it was apparent that, as with many events in the secretive upper echelons of Chinese politics, there was more to the story. Now, as the Party's 18th National Congress oversees the biggest leadership transition in decades, and installs the Bo family's long-time rival Xi Jinping as president, China's rulers are finding it increasingly difficult to keep their poisonous internal divisions behind closed doors. Bo Xilai's breathtaking fall from grace is an extraordinary tale of excess, murder, defection, political purges and ideological clashes going back to Mao himself, as the princeling sons of the revolutionary heroes ascend to control of the Party. China watcher John Garnaut examines how Bo's stellar rise through the ranks troubled his more reformist peers, as he revived anti-'capitalist roader' sentiment, even while his family and associates enjoyed the more open economy's opportunities. Amid fears his imminent elevation to the powerful Standing Committee was leading China towards another destructive Cultural Revolution, have his opponents seized their chance to destroy Bo and what he stood for? The trigger was his wife Gu Kailai's apparently paranoid murder of an English family friend, which exposed the corruption and brutality of Bo's outwardly successful administration of the massive city of Chongqing. It also led to the one of the highest-level attempted defections in Communist China's history when Bo's right-hand man, police chief Wang Lijun, tried to escape the ruins of his sponsor's reputation. Garnaut explains how this incredible glimpse into the very personal power struggles within the CCP exposes the myth of the unified one-party state. With China approaching super-power status, today's leadership shuffle may set the tone for international relations for decades. Here, Garnaut reveals a particularly Chinese spin on the old adage that the personal is political. 'His insight is unique and well applied to this extraordinary, intergenerational set of events that Hollywood couldn't dream up if it tried' ABC Sydney John Garnaut is China correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, in the Fairfax Media stable, and also writes for Foreign Policy magazine. He joined Fairfax in 2002 as an economics journalist after working as a commercial lawyer. His work on China has been recognised with several awards, including the 2009 Walkley Award for Scoop of the Year, for reporting the detention of Australian Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu. John lived in Beijing for two years in the 1980s, while his father was posted as the Australian ambassador, and returned there with his wife and children in 2007.
Download or read book A Life Less Ordinary written by John Hodge and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the TRAINSPOTTING and SHALLOW GRAVE screenplays, a novel about the unpredictable course of fate. An aspiring novelist meets a rich woman with a slender grip on the real world. They are ill-matched but become lovers, with a little help from the archangel Gabriel. Tied to the release of a Hollywood feature film.
Download or read book A Billion Voices written by David Moser and published by Penguin Group Australia. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mandarin, Guoyu or Putonghua? 'Chinese' is a language known by many names, and China is a country home to many languages. Since the turn of the twentieth century linguists and politicians have been on a mission to create a common language for China. From the radical intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement, to leaders such as Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, all fought linguistic wars to push the boundaries of language reform. Now, Internet users take the Chinese language in new and unpredictable directions. David Moser tells the remarkable story of China's language unification agenda and its controversial relationship with modern politics, challenging our conceptions of what it means to speak and be Chinese. 'If you want to know what the language situation of China is on the ground and in the trenches, and you only have time to read one book, this is it. A veritable tour de force, in just a little over a hundred pages, David Moser has filled this brilliant volume with linguistic, political, historical, and cultural data that are both reliable and enlightening. Written with captivating wit and exacting expertise, A Billion Voices is a masterpiece of clear thinking and incisive exposition.' Victor H. Mair, American sinologist, professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Columbia History of Chinese Literature 'David Moser explains the complex aspects of Putonghua against the backdrop of history, delivering the information with authority and simplicity in a style accessible both to speakers of Chinese and those who are simply fascinated by the language. All of the questions that people have asked me about Chinese over the years, and more, are answered in this book. The history of Putonghua and the vital importance of creating a common language is a story David Moser brings to life in an enjoyable way.' Laszlo Montgomery, The China History Podcast
Download or read book I Have a Dog written by Charlotte Lance and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I have a dog. An inconvenient dog. When I wake up, my dog is inconvenient. When I'm getting dressed, my dog is inconvenient. And when I'm making tunnels, my dog is SUPER inconvenient. But sometimes, an inconvenient dog can be big and warm and cuddly. Sometimes, an inconvenient dog can be the most comforting friend in the whole wide world.
Download or read book Beauty of the Canadian Rockies written by Meghan Ward and published by Rocky Mountain Books Incorporated. This book was released on 2017 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring 60 stunning, colour photos Beauty of the Canadian Rockies is part of a new series of full-colour travel and tourism books celebrating the internationally renowned Canadian Rockies. In celebration of the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation and in conjunction with Parks Canada's announcement that entrance to all of Canada's national parks, national historic sites and national marine conservation areas will be free throughout 2017, RMB is excited to launch an entirely new series of photography books created and designed to highlight the beauty, majesty and awe-inspiring landscapes found in western Canada's most prestigious mountain environments. With photography by Paul Zizka and accompanying captions written by Meghan J. Ward, this brand new series features up-to-date images and text highlighting the most popular locations and iconic vistas throughout the Rocky Mountain parks. As millions of visitors are expected to tour Banff, Canmore, Lake Louise, Jasper, Kananaskis, Waterton and Yoho throughout 2017, RMB has designed this series to include a variety of formats and prices that are meant to appeal to all tastes and budgets. Perfect for locals and tourists; galleries, gift shops, hotels, information centres and museums; conferences, corporate events and festivals, these beautifully produced books will celebrate the beauty of Canada's Rocky Mountain landscape for years to come.
Download or read book Flock of Brown Birds written by Ge Fei and published by Penguin Group Australia. This book was released on 2016-06-20 with total page 47 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this avant garde novella, memory and time are subjective. A writer named Ge Fei retreats to the beautiful solitude of the Waterside to finish his novel inspired by the Revelations of St. John. He perceives ominous and portentous signs in the natural landscape around him, particularly in a flock of brown birds that flies periodically past his window. The arrival of a mysterious woman named Qi magnifies his anxiety and sense of temporal disorientation, calling into question his grasp on reality. 'It is impossible to enter the deeper aspects of contemporary Chinese literature without also entering the world of Ge Fei.' Enrique Vila-Matas
Download or read book Shanghai s Art Deco Master written by Spencer Dodington and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The story of French architect Paul Veysseyre's Art Deco contribution to the feel of old Shanghai." -- back of dust jacket.
Download or read book The Remedy for Love written by Bill Roorbach and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A page-turner, a love story and a vivid drama of man (and woman) against the elements . . . A great read by a wonderful writer.” —Newsday When the “Storm of the Century” threatens western Maine, Eric closes his office early and heads to the grocery store. In line ahead of him, an unkempt and seemingly unstable young woman comes up short on cash, so Eric offers her twenty bucks and a ride home. Trouble is, Danielle doesn’t really have a home. She’s squatting in a cabin deep in the woods: no electricity, no plumbing, no heat. Eric, with problems of his own, tries to walk away, but finds he can’t. Fending off her mistrust of him, he gets her set up with food, water, and firewood, and departs with relief. But when he climbs back to the road, his car is gone, and in desperation he returns to the cabin. As the storm intensifies, these two lost souls are forced to wait it out together. Deeply moving, frequently funny, The Remedy for Love is a story about the secrets revealed when there is no time or space for anything but the truth. “A superbly grown-uplove story.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Brilliant . . . A tale that is as gripping as any Everest expedition--and that is also tender and terrifying and funny and, in the end, so true it seems inevitable.” —Peter Heller, author of The Dog Stars and The Painter “Roorbach . . . is at the top of his literary game here. He is masterful in inviting readers along, allowing them to slowly get to know these two strangers as they get to know one another.” —Portland (Maine) Press Herald “Snowbound in Maine, two strangers struggle to survive--fighting, flirting, baring secrets. Their sexy, snappy dialogue will keep you racing through.” —People “One of the best novels of this or any year . . . A flat-out funny, sexy, and poignant romantic thriller.” —David Abrams, author of Fobbit
