Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Volume 82, 1 May-31st July 1963 (Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru)
The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru has established its position as the single most important, authoritative, and reliable source on Nehru's life, work, and thought. It is indispensable to the scholar, fascinating to the layperson, and at times something of a primer in politics, democracy, and world affairs, as Nehru intended his periodic letters to his chief ministers to be. It provides a panorama of home and the world as seen from the centre of power in India by an acutely sensitive observe...
Running in the Family (Picador Books) (New Canadian Library S.)
by Michael Ondaatje
'During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed...I think all of our lives have been terribly shaped by what went on before us.' Twenty-five years after leaving his native Sri Lanka for the cool winters of Ontario, a chaotic dream of tropical heat and barking dogs pushes Michael Ondaatje to travel back home and revisit a childhood and a family he never fully understood. Along with his siblings and children, Ondaa...
"A touching, contemplative chronicle of loss and self-discovery." - Publishers Weekly From the acclaimed biographer of Norway's most treasured cultural icons, Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Munch, comes a story of a migrant family in search of roots and for each other. Ivo de Figueiredo's lyrical and imagistic memoir navigates a difficult search for the origins of his estranged father, which opens a door to a family history spanning four continents, five centuries and the rise and fall of two empire...
A first-hand account of China's cultural revolution. Nien Cheng, an anglophile and fluent English-speaker who worked for Shell in Shanghai under Mao, was put under house arrest by Red Guards in 1966 and subsequently jailed. All attempts to make her confess to the charges of being a British spy failed; all efforts to indoctrinate her were met by a steadfast and fearless refusal to accept the terms offered by her interrogators. When she was released from prison she was told that her daug...
The story of the great Muslim peacemaker Badshah Khan, who joined Mahatma Gandhi in nonviolent resistance to British rule in India. Khān Abdul Ghaffār Khān (Badshah Khan or Bacha Khan) came from a Pathan society that was steeped in a tradition of blood revenge, but Khan raised a nonviolent "army" of 100,000 men and joined Mohandas Gandhi in civil disobedience to British rule in India. Easwaran’s biography of Khan is a comprehensive account of the man who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize...
Iris Chang's best-selling book The Rape of Nanking forever changed the way we view the Second World War in Asia. It all began with a photo of a river choked with the bodies of hundreds of Chinese civilians that shook Iris to her core. Who were these people? Why had this happened and how could their story have been lost to history? She could not shake that image from her head. She could not forget what she had seen. A few short years later, Chang revealed this "second Holocaust" to the world....
One of the best ways to understand history is through eye-witness accounts. Ting-Xing Ye’s riveting first book, A Leaf in the Bitter Wind, is a memoir of growing up in Maoist China. It was an astonishing coming of age through the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1974). In the wave of revolutionary fervour, peasants neglected their crops, exacerbating the widespread hunger. While Ting-Xing was a young girl in Shanghai, her father’s rubber factory was expropriated by the state...
Mary Paik Lee left her native country in 1905, traveling with her parents as a political refugee after Japan imposed control over Korea. Her father worked in the sugar plantations of Hawaii briefly before taking his family to California. They shared the poverty-stricken existence endured by thousands of Asian immigrants in the early twentieth century, working as farm laborers, cooks, janitors, and miners. Lee recounts racism on the playground and the ravages of mercury mining on her father’s hea...
Lives of the Nuns
This book contains the biographies of 65 Chinese women who were Buddhist monks in early China. It is a great read for anyone interested in Buddhism or women in religion.
Jan Wong, a Canadian of Chinese descent, went to China as a starry-eyed Maoist in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution. A true believer -- and one of only two Westerners permitted to enroll at Beijing University -- her education included wielding a pneumatic drill at the Number One Machine Tool Factory. In the name of the Revolution, she renounced rock and roll, hauled pig manure in the paddy fields, and turned in a fellow student who sought her help in getting to the United States. She...
This captivating memoir of a young man's daring escape from his life under Cambodia's brutal Khmer Rouge regime will leave readers utterly engrossed until the final page. Forced from his home with his family, teenager Mae Taing struggles to endure years of constant starvation, backbreaking labor, and ruthless cruelty from his captors. Undaunted, he retains hope and unflagging perseverance, eventually immigrating to the United States as a refugee, escaping the horrors of the Cambodian genocide-a...
In 1995, during the publicity tour for his much-acclaimed first novel, The Jade Peony, Wayson Choy received a mysterious phone call from a woman claiming to have just seen his mother on a streetcar. He politely informed the caller that she must be mistaken, since his mother had died long ago. “No, no, not that mother,” the voice insisted. “Your real mother.” Inspired by the startling realization that, like many children of Chinatown, he had been adopted, Choy constructs a vivid and moving m...
A biography of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The book gives a detailed account of his upbringing in India, his mathematical achievements, and his mathematical collaboration with English mathematician G. H. Hardy. The book also reviews the life of Hardy and the academic culture of Cambridge University during the early twentieth century.