A fascinating journey through 100 years of Chinese history, beginning with the historic Treaty of Nanking and ending with Mao Tse-tung’s creation of the Chinese People’s Republic, by the the acclaimed New Yorker correspondent who lived in China from 1935 to 1941 For centuries, China’s code of behavior was incomprehensible to Westerners whom the Chinese viewed as irredeemable barbarians. Presenting historical events with an immediacy that makes you feel as if you were there, Hahn takes readers through isolationist China’s difficult and often costly adaptations to the invasions of Western “foreign devils”, —from the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, which gave the West access to five 5 of China’s eastern ports, to the British colonization of Hong Kong, the rise of the tea trade, the Opium Wars, the arrival of Christian missionaries, and the Boxer Rebellion. Hahn also illuminates the revolutionary movement led by Sun Yat-sen, the overthrow of the Ch’ing Dynasty, the escalating tensions between the Communist and Nationalist parties, and the Japanese invasion on the eve of World War II—which Hahn witnessed firsthand. The final chapters cover the civil war, which ended with Chairman Mao’s formation of the People’s Republic of China and Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat to Taiwan. With an insider’s knowledge of Chinese culture and the politics, Hahn delivers a sharply observant book that illuminates an unforgettable era in China’s tumultuous past.

When Israeli Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon published the novel Only Yesterday in 1945, it quickly became recognized as a major work of world literature, not only for its vivid historical reconstruction of Israel's founding society. The book tells a seemingly simple tale about a man who immigrates to Palestine with the Second Aliya--the several hundred idealists who returned between 1904 and 1914 to work the Hebrew soil as in Biblical times and revive Hebrew culture. This epic novel also engages the reader in a fascinating network of meanings, contradictions, and paradoxes all leading to the question, what, if anything, controls human existence? Seduced by Zionist slogans, young Isaac Kumer imagines the Land of Israel filled with the financial, social, and erotic opportunities that were denied him, the son of an impoverished shopkeeper, in Poland. Once there, he cannot find the agricultural work he anticipated. Instead Isaac happens upon house-painting jobs as he moves from secular, Zionist Jaffa, where the ideological fervor and sexual freedom are alien to him, to ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionist Jerusalem. While some of his Zionist friends turn capitalist, becoming successful merchants, his own life remains adrift and impoverished in a land torn between idealism and practicality, a place that is at once homeland and diaspora. Eventually he marries a religious woman in Jerusalem, after his worldly girlfriend in Jaffa rejects him. Led astray by circumstances, Isaac always ends up in the place opposite of where he wants to be, but why? The text soars to Surrealist-Kafkaesque dimensions when, in a playful mode, Isaac drips paint on a stray dog, writing "Crazy Dog" on his back. Causing panic wherever he roams, the dog takes over the story, until, after enduring persecution for so long without "understanding" why, he really does go mad and bites Isaac. The dog has been interpreted as everything from the embodiment of Exile to a daemonic force, and becomes an unforgettable character in a book about the death of God, the deception of discourse, the power of suppressed eroticism, and the destiny of a people depicted in all its darkness and promise.

Unearths the forgotten history of a catastrophic flood, examining its profound impact upon the environment and society of modern China.

Includes book reviews and bibliographies.

The convulsive history of foreign journalists in China starts with newspapers printed in the European factories of Canton in the 1820s. It also starts with a duel between two editors over the future of China and ends with a fistfight in Shanghai over therevolution. This book tells the story of China's foreign journalists.

From the author of No.1 international bestseller Collapse, a mesmerizing portrait of the human past that offers profound lessons for how we can live today Visionary, prize-winning author Jared Diamond changed the way we think about the rise and fall of human civilizations with his previous international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. Now he returns with another epic - and groundbreaking - journey into our rapidly receding past. In The World Until Yesterday, Diamond reveals how traditional societies around the world offer an extraordinary window onto how our ancestors lived for the majority of human history - until virtually yesterday, in evolutionary terms - and provide unique, often overlooked insights into human nature. Drawing extensively on his decades working in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, Diamond explores how tribal societies approach essential human problems, from childrearing to conflict resolution to health, and discovers we have much to learn from traditional ways of life. He unearths remarkable findings - from the reason why modern afflictions like diabetes, obesity and Alzheimer's are virtually non-existent in tribal societies to the surprising benefits of multilingualism. Panoramic in scope and thrillingly original, The World Until Yesterday provides an enthralling first-hand picture of the human past that also suggests profound lessons for how to live well today. Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the seminal million-copy-bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was named one of TIME's best non-fiction books of all time, and Collapse, a #1 international bestseller. A professor of geography at UCLA and noted polymath, Diamond's work has been influential in the fields of anthropology, biology, ornithology, ecology and history, among others.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.