Titres dans Asie

In this fully revised and updated third edition, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Maura Elizabeth Cunningham provide cogent answers to urgent questions regarding the world's newest superpower and offer a framework for understanding China's meteoric rise from developing country to superpower. Framing their answers through the historical legacies that largely define China's present-day trajectory, Wasserstrom and Cunningham introduce listeners to the Chinese Communist Party, the building boom in Shanghai, and the environmental fallout of rapid Chinese industrialization.

Storm Clouds over the Pacific begins the story long before Pearl Harbor, showing how the war can only be understood if ancient hatreds and long-standing geopolitics are taken into account. Harmsen demonstrates how Japan and China's ancient enmity led to increased tensions in the 1930s, which, in turn, exploded into conflict in 1937.

The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was the third most powerful navy in the world at the start of World War II and came to dominate the Pacific in the early months of the war. This was a remarkable turnaround for a navy that only began to modernize in 1868. The Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific War details the Japanese ships which fought in the Pacific and examines the principles on which they were designed, how they were armed, when and where they were deployed, and how effective they were in battle.

The first comprehensive and authoritative history of the Koh-i-Noor, arguably the most celebrated and mythologised jewel in the world. On 29 March 1849, the 10-year-old Maharajah of the Punjab was ushered into the magnificent Mirrored Hall at the great Fort in Lahore. There, in a public ceremony, the frightened but dignified child handed over to the British East India Company in a formal act of submission not only swathes of the richest land in India but also arguably the single most valuable object in the subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-i-Noor diamond.

On August 6, 1945, the United States unleashed a weapon unlike anything the world had ever seen. Then, just three days later, when Japan showed no sign of surrender, the United States took aim at Nagasaki. Rendered in harrowing detail, this historical narrative is the second and final volume in M. G. Sheftall’s series Embers. Sheftall has spent years personally interviewing hibakusha—the Japanese word for atomic bomb survivors.

Le Bushi, c'est le samouraï, le soldat du Moyen Age japonais. le Bushidô est un code de conduite, l'ensemble des valeurs que ce chevalier d'Orient était censé respecter. Pour l'auteur de cet ouvrage, Inazo Nitobe, c'est aussi le fond culturel et moral du Japon tout entier, la colonne vertébrale de la mentalité nipponne.

The most authoritative and highly regarded single-volume history of India – from ancient time to the modern day. Five millennia of the sub-continent’s social, economic, political and cultural history are interpreted by one of our finest writers on India and the Far East.

In just over a hundred years - from the death of Muhammad in 632 to the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750 - the followers of the Prophet swept across the whole of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. Their armies threatened states as far flung as the Franks in Western Europe and the Tang Empire in China. The conquered territory was larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion, and it was claimed for the Arabs in roughly half the time.

Listeners of this book will gain a clear understanding of what makes the Japanese, and their society, tick.

Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian chronicle how an impoverished and terrorized China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s and how ordinary people broke free from the beliefs that had shaped their lives during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. These changes, and the unprecedented and sustained economic growth that followed, transformed China and the world.

Of the many myths that emerged following the end of the Korean War, the prevailing one in the West was that of the absolute supremacy of US Air Force pilots and aircraft over their Soviet-supplied opponents. The claims of the 10:1 victory-loss ratio achieved by the US Air Force fighter pilots flying the North American F-86 Sabre against their communist adversaries, amongst other such fabrications, went unchallenged until the end of the Cold War, when Soviet records of the conflict were finally opened. From that point onwards, a very different story began to emerge.

The “compelling [and] vivid” (The New York Times Book Review) true story of a man who claimed to be a survivor of a 1919 British massacre in India, his elaborate 20-year plan for revenge, and the mix of truth and legend that made him a hero to hundreds of millions.

From kung-fu to tofu, tea to trade routes, sages to silk, China has influenced cuisine, commerce, military strategy, aesthetics, and philosophy across the world for thousands of years. Chinese history is nothing if not messy. Heroes are also villains; prosperity mingles with violence; cultural vibrancy coexists with censorship and repression. Modern China is seen variously as an economic powerhouse, an icon of urbanization, a propaganda state, and an aggressive superpower seeking world domination.

Andrei Lankov has gone where few outsiders have ever been. A native of the former Soviet Union, he lived as an exchange student in North Korea in the 1980s. He has studied it for his entire career, using his fluency in Korean and personal contacts to build a rich, nuanced understanding. In The Real North Korea, Lankov substitutes cold, clear analysis for the overheated rhetoric surrounding this opaque police state.

In The People's Republic of Amnesia, NPR correspondent Louisa Lim charts how the events of June 4 changed China, and how China changed the events of June 4 by rewriting its own history. Lim reveals new details about those fateful days, including how one of the country's most senior politicians lost a family member to an army bullet, as well as the inside story of the young soldiers sent to clear Tiananmen Square.

As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control.

Afghanistan traces the historic struggles and the changing nature of political authority in this volatile region of the world, from the Mughal Empire in the 16th century to the Taliban resurgence today. Thomas Barfield introduces listeners to the bewildering diversity of tribal and ethnic groups in Afghanistan, explaining what unites them as Afghans despite the regional, cultural, and political differences that divide them.

During the peak of the Afghanistan War, a group of soldiers is dropped by helicopter into the remote mountains outside of Kandahar City. Mismanaged and overlooked by command, the squad must rely on each other to survive. Their mission is to train and advise the Afghan National Police and help rebuild the country of Afghanistan. The Afghan Police station they are assigned to live in is falling apart and disease-ridden.

The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is a fascinating, detailed account of Japanese court life in the closing years of the 10th century. Written by a lady of the court at the height of Heian culture, this book enthrals with its lively gossip, witty observations and subtle impressions. Lady Shōnagon was an erstwhile rival of Lady Murasaki, whose novel, The Tale of Genji, fictionalized the elite world Lady Shōnagon so eloquently relates.

National security expert Dennis Molinaro reveals the shocking details of Beijing’s five-decades-long effort to influence and interfere in Canadian political life. From cultivating future political leaders at the end of the Cultural Revolution to the foreign-interference scandals that have shaken present-day Ottawa, this definitive book addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time.