2 Books Like The King's Harvest

People often have the idea that traditional medicines and herbs are a gentle, natural way of solving health problems, and that chemotherapy is a modern, Western invention... but not at all! This book charts the use of seriously toxic compounds in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in medieval times, to demonstrate that substances like arsenic and aconite have long had a really important place in medical practice. This is an eye-opening book, which serves to demonstrate that very toxic substances have been to fight cancer and other horrible conditions within TCM for more than fifteen centuries, and "natural" doesn't necessarily mean that these remedies come without some pretty brutal side-effects. This is a shocking read and some of the case histories described are horrendous, but then that's true of any book about the history of medicine. This is a subject written in human blood and pain!

There's a reason why this wonderful book is back in print! In this marvelous study of the craftspeople of Han dynasty China (approximately 200 BCE-200 CE), Anthony Barbieri-Low looks at the people who made the beautiful objects that now fill museums around the world--what were their lives like? Who cast these bronzes, wove this silk, threw these pots, painted this lacquer, and beyond that, who chopped down the trees and mined the metal? This is a fantastic account of the manufacturing processes that created physical objects, and wherever possible, the author has looked beyond conventional aesthetic approaches (isn't this a pretty thing?) to think about the much less lovely aspects of the lives of the makers and the troubles they faced, particularly when they were enslaved or criminalized. Go to any major museum with a good Chinese art collection and you can look at the objects these people made, but… show more.