Secretary of Homeland Security, Joseph Hanson, is more than just a patriot, farmer and father. His high ranking position in the government consumes his every being; leaving him absent to his duties that he has always enjoyed on the family farm. Current technology leads Hanson to confirm the information that was handed down by his grandfather’s allies, before modern communication.After the unexplained disappearance of Joseph and his wife, their own children pieced together the handw...

Although numerous accounts have been published of the genesis and character of the attempted October 1965 coup in Indonesia, many important aspects of that affair still remain very unclear. This seminal work by two of the world's leading Indonesianists offers the first clear analysis of what really occurred during this dark time in Indonesia's history.

Since the Bali bombings of 2002 and the rise of political Islam, Indonesia has frequently occupied media headlines. Nevertheless, the history of the fourth largest country on earth remains relatively unknown. Adrian Vickers' book, first published in 2005, traces the history of an island country, comprising some 240 million people, from the colonial period through revolution and independence to the present. Framed around the life story of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia's most famous and c...

“As the book’s subtitle indicates, Mr. Ziegler uses one of the world’s great rivers as a vehicle to pursue this story—and what a vehicle it is. . . . [He] writes beautifully, and with the fervor of a naturalist.” ***—*The Wall Street Journal“The writing is superb . . . a true labour of love, Black Dragon River is a triumph.” *—The SpectatorBlack Dragon River* is a personal...

In this scintillating book, Ian Buruma peels away the myths that surround Japanese culture. With piercing analysis of cinema, theatre, television, art and legend, he shows the Japanese both 'as they imagine themselves to be, and as they would like themselves to be.'A Japanese Mirror examines samurai and gangsters, transvestites and goddesses to paint an eloquent picture of life in Japan. This is a country long shrouded in enigma and in his compelling book, Buruma reveals a...

Authored by an expert on Southeast Asian history, an illustrated addition to the hitherto small corpus of knowledge about a fascinating and little known subject.Using detailed descriptions, accurate cutaway plates and reliable historical examples, this book covers the history of Chinese ship design and naval warfare from the beginning of the Han dynasty to the first few years of the Ming dynasty.The epic battle of Lake Poyang in in 1363, won by the man who ...

Since the end of the Cold War, the operations of secret police informers have come under the media spotlight and it is now common knowledge that vast internal networks of spies in the Soviet Union and East Germany were directed by the Communist Party. By contrast, very little historical information has been available on the covert operations of the security services in Mao Zedong's China. However, as Michael Schoenhals reveals in this intriguing and sometimes sinister account, public secur...

The decades between 1970 and the end of the twentieth century saw the disciplines of history and anthropology draw closer together, with historians paying more attention to social and cultural factors and the significance of everyday experience in the study of the past. The people, rather than elite actors, became the focus of their inquiry, and anthropological insights into agriculture, kinship, ritual, and folk customs enabled historians to develop richer and more representative narrativ...

In this classic account, Bernard Wasserstein draws on the files of the Shanghai Police as well as the intelligence archives of the many countries involved, to provide the definitive story of Shanghai's secret war. Bernard Wasserstein introduces the British, American and Australian individuals who collaborated with the Axis powers as well as subversive warfare operatives battling the Japanese - and one another. At times both shocking and amusing, this book lifts the lid on the bizarre under...

The authors in this volume believe that long-term, profound, and sometimes tumultuous changes in the last five hundred years of the history of China have been no less geographical than social, political, or economic. From the dialectics of local-empire relations to the imperial state’s persistent array of projects for absorbing and transforming ethnic regions on the margins of empire; from the tripling of imperial territories in the Qing to the disputes over the identity of the former “out...

Phu Rieng was one of many French rubber plantations in colonial Vietnam; Tran Tu Binh was one of 17,606 laborers brought to work there in 1927, and his memoir is a straightforward, emotionally searing account of how one Vietnamese youth became involved in revolutionary politics. The connection between this early experience and later activities of the author becomes clear as we learn that Tran Tu Binh survived imprisonment on Con Son island to help engineer the general uprising in Hanoi in ...

Sandwiched between the heart of ancient Greece and the lands of Persia, the Greek cities of Western Anatolia were the spark that ignited some of the most iconic conflicts of the ancient world.Fought over repeatedly in the 5th century BC, their conquest by the Persians provided a casus belli for Alexander the Great to cross the Hellespont in 334 BC and launch the battle of Granicus and the sieges of Miletus and Halicarnassus. A blend of Greek and Asian styl...