What must China do to become truly democratic and equitable? This question animates most progressive debates about this potential superpower, and inChina's Twentieth Century the country's leading critic, Wang Hui, turns to the past for an answer. Beginning with the birth of modern politics in the 1911 revolution, Wang tracks the initial flourishing of political life, its blossoming in the radical sixties, and its decline in China's more recent liberalization, to arrive at the cros...

Atlantis is perfect. That is what makes it dangerous.Before dawn, a supply vessel races toward the Harbor District beneath the white beam of the Star Tower. For Lacian Viseran, a structural calibration apprentice born among harbor workers, the city has always been a machine of sacred precision: towers, bridges, rituals, records, and laws bound into one flawless order.Then a cold white light rises from beneath the sea.The ship drops. Steel fails. People are injured. And...

This book is a retelling, in easy-to-read Chinese, of the legendary story of how a little stone monkey was born, became king of his troop of monkeys, left his home to pursue enlightenment, received the name Sun Wukong (literally, "ape seeking the void") from his teacher, and returned home to defend his subjects from a ravenous monster.Sun Wukong, the Handsome Monkey King, is one of the most famous characters in Chinese literature and culture. His legendary bravery, his foolish mist...

A king lights emergency beacons just to make his favorite concubine laugh. A prince survives an assassination attempt by pretending to die with an arrow in his belt. A reformer builds the most powerful state in China—only to be destroyed by the very laws he created. Ancient Chinese history is full of moments like these, but you rarely hear them told this way.This book brings the turbulent Spring and Autumn and early Warring States periods to life as a series of vivid human dramas. Y...

A king once lit his nation's emergency beacons—not to warn of invasion, but to make his favorite concubine laugh. When the real enemies arrived, no one came to help.That moment helped bring down one of the greatest dynasties in ancient China. And it's only one of the stories waiting inside this book.The Origins of Chinese Civilization: A History of China tells the story of China's earliest age the way it was meant to be told—through the myths, heroes, disasters, and strange h...

Atlantis has begun to count its own people as fuel.When Lacian Viseran follows a hidden coordinate into the city's sealed understructure, he finds the scar left by the first opening of the Second Gate: a wound beneath the memorials, beneath the Temple seals, beneath every official history Atlantis still dares to recite. The city's miracles are not failing by accident. They are waking.Lacian is a structural calibrator, trained to read stress, load, fracture, and collapse. But ...

China, 1057 B.C. The foolish king of the Shang Dynasty has gravely insulted a goddess. In revenge, the goddess sends a thousand-year-old fox demon to extinguish the soul of the beautiful young Daji, inhabit her body, and seduce the king into taking her as his chief concubine. Daji slowly gains control of the king and his kingdom, leading the Shang Dynasty towards chaos and disaster. But gods and demons are all watching closely and try to take matters into their own hands.This book ...

Mossad: Civilizations of the Middle East, pulls you into the hidden world where politics, faith, and espionage collide. From David Ben-Gurion's early calls to arms to Golda Meir's covert meetings in the run‑up to statehood, the book traces how a small, exposed nation stitched together one of the world's most feared intelligence services. Writing it felt like chasing ghosts through history — the Mossad's origins were ragged and improvisational, yet shot through with fierce ...

Ancient Greece: Europe in History, PART TWO, is my attempt to tell the Greek story the way it actually felt to live it—tense, unstable, and full of agonizing choices. I open the book with two competing roads to power, Athens and Sparta, and trace how their very different ideas about freedom, discipline, and leadership pushed the Greek world toward confrontation. What begins as cooperation—alliances and shared purpose—slowly hardens into rivalry, and then into something far...

We don't read Yuval Noah Harari to predict the future.We read him to prepare ourselves for it.This is not a summary of Harari's books.This is a re-launch from the launchpad of his ideas — a new journey that goes beyond Harari:From Sapiens and the revolution of storytelling, we reflect on how to narrate our own lives.From Homo Deus and the rise of AI, we explore how to defend our free will.F...

The Last King of Shang is a retelling, in modern Simplified Chinese, of the classic novel Investiture of the Gods. It's a gripping story set in ancient China, weaving together mythology, magic, and heroism. It is a story of the rise and fall of powerful gods and mortals amidst a backdrop of political intrigue and celestial conflict. Seduced by Daji, his beautiful fox demon concubine, the Shang king brings his kingdom to the brink of ruin through cruelty and neglect.A group of rebel...

Crusades: Civilizations of the Middle East, PART ONE, plunges you into a world where faith, ambition, and human courage crash together on an enormous stage. When I first set out to write this book, my aim was simple: to bring readers up close to the people who lived behind history's headlines — not to idolize them as marble figures in a textbook, but to show them as flesh-and-blood leaders whose choices reshaped continents. Think of Pope Urban II and Godfrey of Bouillon; B...