A landmark history of North Korea, told through the rise of the Kim dynasty and its surprising ties to American Christianity—a spectacular, penetrating account of the Hermit Kingdom • A Foreign Policy Most Anticipated Book of 2026“How do personality cults take hold? What happens when leaders mix politics and faith to demand immense sacrifices? Jonathan Cheng’s magnificent tale poses questions about the world far beyond North Korea. This utterly eye...

A landmark history of North Korea, told through the rise of the Kim dynasty and its surprising ties to American Christianity—a spectacular, penetrating account of the Hermit Kingdom • A Foreign Policy Most Anticipated Book of 2026For nearly eight decades, North Korea has marched defiantly to its own beat, shaking off its Soviet and Chinese sponsors to emerge as the world’s most enigmatic nation—a nuclear-armed state ruled by a dictatorial dynasty. Underpin...

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA NON-FICTION CROWN*Meet the three women who helped shape the course of modern Chinese history; a gripping story of sisterhood and betrayal from the bestselling author of Wild Swans.They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled seismic transformations these three women left an indelible mark on history.Red Sister rose to be Mao's vice-chair.Little S...

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader offers in-depth portraits of North Korea's two ruthless and bizarrely Orwellian leaders, Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. Lifting North Korea's curtain of self-imposed isolation, this book will take readers inside a society, that to a Westerner, will appear to be from another planet. Subsisting on a diet short on food grains and long on lies, North Koreans have been indoctrinated from birth to follow unquestioningly a father-son team of meg...

The first biography of one of the most controversial and fascinating women of the twentieth century.Beautiful, brilliant, and captivating, Madame Chiang Kai-shek seized unprecedented power during China's long and violent civil war. She passionately argued against Chinese Communism in the international arena and influenced decades of Sino-American relations and modern Chinese history. Raised in one of China's most powerful families and educated at Wellesley College,...

“A milestone in Western studies of China.” (John K. Fairbank)In this masterful, highly original approach to modern Chinese history, Jonathan D. Spence shows us the Chinese revolution through the eyes of its most articulate participants—the writers, historians, philosophers, and insurrectionists who shaped and were shaped by the turbulent events of the twentieth century. By skillfully combining literary materials with more conventional sources of political and socia...

After Hitler brought Ante Pavelic to power in the First Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state created on April 10th, 1941, Pavelic created 34 “summary” courts throughout Croatia that June. He empowered every Croatian to arrest and kill Serbians without being charged with a crime. Any Croat could sit on these “courts,” including former convicts who issued arrest warrants and passed out death sentences. Mobile court units roamed the countryside in which Serbs were arrested, tried, con...

History didn't end. Democracy didn't triumph. America's leading role in the world is no longer assured. Instead, autocrats and populist strongmen are on the rise, and the global order established after 1945 is under attack. This is the phenomenon Katie Stallard tackles in Dancing on Bones, as she examines how the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea manipulate the past to serve the present and secure the future of authoritarian rule. Russia has annexed Crimea, started a war i...

An expert on North Korea sheds new light on the enigmatic tyrantFrom his goose-stepping military parades to his clownish macho swagger, North Korea's Kim Jong-il is an odd amalgam of political cartoon and global menace. In charge of a nuclear arsenal he's threatened to use against the U.S. and Japan, the man, his motives, and the mechanisms of his absolute control over a country of twenty-three million people remains shrouded in mystery.In this second editi...

On February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared its independence, becoming the seventh state to emerge from the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. A tiny country of just two million people, 90% of whom are ethnic Albanians, Kosovo is central-geographically, historically, and politically-to the future of the Western Balkans and, in turn, its potential future within the European Union. But the fate of both Kosovo, condemned by Serbian leaders as a "fake state" and the region as a whole, remains uncert...

Here for the first time is a personal account direct from a leader of the Korean rebels fighting against the Japanese who have ruled them for a generation. It is a story that fits the American tradition and the American wish to understand and support all peoples who have fought against their tyrants and oppressors. Perhaps not many know that Christianity was the mother of Korean Independence, that Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points fired the Korean heart and that the betrayal at Versailles b...

From the world’s most repressive state comes rare good news: the escape to freedom of a small number of its people. It is a crime to leave North Korea. Yet increasing numbers of North Koreans dare to flee. They go first to neighboring China, which rejects them as criminals, then on to Southeast Asia or Mongolia, and finally to South Korea, the United States, and other free countries. They travel along a secret route known as the new underground railroad.With a journalist’s grasp of...