Here are 100 books that The Man Who Loved China fans have personally recommended if you like
The Man Who Loved China.
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My expertise is in Russian history. My passion is understanding the unleashing of human creativity. Only in the past several hundred years have we learned to comprehend and harness nature, organize democratic and rule-based societies, and, more than ever before, enable ordinary people to realize their talents and inner yearnings. Brilliant, creative individuals have existed in every society. Only in the modern era have so many geniuses, who in past ages would have wasted their talents in obscure drudgery, found the means and opportunity to contribute radically more to the benefit of humankind. The books I recommend all reflect this fascinating development.
I wanted to read this book to learn how Enrico Fermi could be the “last man who knew everything.”
It turns out he didn’t know “everything” about “everything,” but rather knew nearly everything in physics. Especially noteworthy was Fermi’s genius for both theoretical and applied physics. It was he, after all, who planned and carried out the first successful atomic chain reaction in a squash court at the University of Chicago and co-invented the nuclear reactor.
I loved learning about a relatively shy boy and a late bloomer (albeit with a photographic memory!) who became a brilliant, extremely supportive teacher and a scientist, about whom more positive things were said after his death than about any other twentieth-century scientist.
In 1942, a team at the University of Chicago achieved what no one had before: a nuclear chain reaction. At the forefront of this breakthrough stood Enrico Fermi. Straddling the ages of classical physics and quantum mechanics, equally at ease with theory and experiment, Fermi truly was the last man who knew everything-at least about physics. But he was also a complex figure who was a part of both the Italian Fascist Party and the Manhattan Project, and a less-than-ideal father and husband who nevertheless remained one of history's greatest mentors. Based on new archival material and exclusive interviews, The…
During the First World War, an extraordinary intelligence unit operated from Cairo's Savoy Hotel, combining archaeologists, academics, and soldiers to revolutionize British intelligence in the Middle East. Overshadowed by Lawrence of Arabia, the Arab Bureau's significance has remained hidden ever since.
This study uncovers the Bureau's story through newly discovered…
My expertise is in Russian history. My passion is understanding the unleashing of human creativity. Only in the past several hundred years have we learned to comprehend and harness nature, organize democratic and rule-based societies, and, more than ever before, enable ordinary people to realize their talents and inner yearnings. Brilliant, creative individuals have existed in every society. Only in the modern era have so many geniuses, who in past ages would have wasted their talents in obscure drudgery, found the means and opportunity to contribute radically more to the benefit of humankind. The books I recommend all reflect this fascinating development.
I was amazed at how a complete outsider, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who grew up in relative poverty, could rise to the highest levels of the British academic world through the sheer force of his intellectual genius.
How could this self-taught mathematical prodigy, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the youngest to win that honor and only the second Indian, make such extraordinary contributions to several areas of mathematics? How lucky for humanity that he was discovered and, though sickly, brought to England!
How many more contributions could he have made had he not died at age 32? How many undiscovered geniuses, hidden in remote corners of the world, have never realized their extraordinary potential?
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JEREMY IRONS AND DEV PATEL!
A moving and enlightening look at the unbelievable true story of how gifted prodigy Ramanujan stunned the scholars of Cambridge University and revolutionized mathematics.
In 1913, a young unschooled Indian clerk wrote a letter to G H Hardy, begging the preeminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers. Realizing the letter was the work of a genius, Hardy arranged for Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England.
Thus began one of the most improbable and productive collaborations ever chronicled. With a passion for rich and evocative detail,…
My expertise is in Russian history. My passion is understanding the unleashing of human creativity. Only in the past several hundred years have we learned to comprehend and harness nature, organize democratic and rule-based societies, and, more than ever before, enable ordinary people to realize their talents and inner yearnings. Brilliant, creative individuals have existed in every society. Only in the modern era have so many geniuses, who in past ages would have wasted their talents in obscure drudgery, found the means and opportunity to contribute radically more to the benefit of humankind. The books I recommend all reflect this fascinating development.
The ability of brilliant scientists in recent centuries to grasp the inner workings of nature fascinates me.
William Gilbert understood magnetism, Isaac Newton formulated a theory of light, and Benjamin Franklin comprehended the unitary nature of electricity. I admire the man who put it all together, James Clerk Maxwell. He was kind, a bit awkward, creative, a devoted husband and teacher, and deeply religious, like many people I know.
Extraordinarily curious from a young age, Maxwell discerned that electric current pervades all things, moving at the speed of light and constantly generating magnetic fields. And this was only the most powerful of his many discoveries.
Einstein declared that “one scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell.”
"Mahon has written a first-rate book on Maxwell's science and legacy." -New Scientist
This is the first biography in twenty years of James Clerk Maxwell, one of the greatest scientists of our time and yet a man relatively unknown to the wider public. Approaching science with a freshness unbound by convention or previous expectations, he produced some of the most original scientific thinking of the nineteenth century - and his discoveries went on to shape the twentieth century.
What's Gotten Into You is a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life travelled billions of miles and across billions of years to make us who…
My expertise is in Russian history. My passion is understanding the unleashing of human creativity. Only in the past several hundred years have we learned to comprehend and harness nature, organize democratic and rule-based societies, and, more than ever before, enable ordinary people to realize their talents and inner yearnings. Brilliant, creative individuals have existed in every society. Only in the modern era have so many geniuses, who in past ages would have wasted their talents in obscure drudgery, found the means and opportunity to contribute radically more to the benefit of humankind. The books I recommend all reflect this fascinating development.
Before I read this book, I had not even heard of James Hutton.
It turns out he was a learned amateur scientist, lawyer, doctor, entrepreneur, and farmer in Scotland who demonstrated before anyone else that the Earth is far older than imagined. I liked the fact that Hutton was lively, energetic, eccentric, and cheerful, with an infectious positive disposition. It must have been a real treat to know him.
His keen observations of the Scottish landscape enabled him to formulate a theory of geological evolution, positing that the Earth is continuously forming and reforming through the action of subterranean heat and pressure and ceaseless erosion. I was amazed to learn that Hutton lacked the great renown of Galileo and Darwin because he wrote obscure prose!
There are three men whose life's work helped free science from the strait-jacket of religion. Two of the three,Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin,are widely heralded for their breakthroughs. The third, James Hutton, is comparatively unknown, yet he profoundly changed our understanding of the earth, its age, and its dynamic forces. A Scottish gentleman farmer, Hutton's observations on his small tract of land led him to a theory that directly contradicted biblical claims that the Earth was only 6,000 years old. This expertly crafted narrative tells the story not only of Hutton, but also of Scotland and the Scottish Enlightenment, including…
I chose the dramatic backdrop of the Tiananmen massacre because after my first trip to China in the 1980’s I became a host family for mainland students studying at UCLA where I was Medical Director of Student Health. During those weeks in 1989 many students communicated with friends and family back in China using our fax machine. From their perspective, the conflict was a generational struggle between the very old leaders, many of whom marched with Mao and who were desperate to hang onto power (and therefore for my plot would want to get their hands on an elixir to double their lifespan), and the younger generation anxious for reforms.
I am delighted to recommend this book. Not only is it a fascinating true story, but it is also a page-turner. The story starts in 1937 when Joseph Needham, an English biochemist, falls in love with a Chinese student. He travels to China with her, where he begins a lifelong quest to document the scientific contributions of ancient China.
In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman ("Elegant and scrupulous"—New York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa ("A mesmerizing page-turner"—Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically advanced country.
No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese…
I was born to privilege in Manhattan. A seeker from the get-go, I perpetually yearned to see below the surface of the pond and understand what lay beneath and how the world really works. Not connecting with Western philosophy, religion, or culture, I turned to the wisdom of the East at a young age. I stayed the course through decades of training in Chinese martial arts, eventually reached some understanding of them, and realized my spiritual ambitions when I was ordained a Daoist monk in China in an official government ceremony. I write about China then and now and teach meditation and tai chi around the world.
Van Gulik is a giant in the field of historical mysteries, having penned the better part of 20 novels about his favorite protagonist “Judge Dee.” Set in ancient China, the stories typically involve political intrigue, moral quandaries, and settings so evocative it is easy to just close your eyes and see yourself in a pavilion overlooking a swan-filled lake or in a lady’s bed-chamber, a scholar’s library, or an artist’s studio. These novels are mood pieces as well as whodunnits, and the immersive experiences the author offers lead me to recommend not only this title but any and all in the series. Heaven for someone like me who loves what China used to be.
Early in his career, Judge Dee visits a senior magistrate who shows him a beautiful lacquer screen on which a scene of lovers has been mysteriously altered to show the man stabbing his lover. The magistrate fears he is losing his mind and will murder his own wife. Meanwhile, a banker has inexplicably killed himself, and a lovely lady has allowed Dee's lieutenant, Chiao Tai, to believe she is a courtesan. Dee and Chiao Tai go incognito among a gang of robbers to solve this mystery, and find the leader of the robbers is more honorable than the magistrate.
I took my first course about Chinese politics in 1973, when the country was still in the tumultuous last years of the Mao era. In a teaching career that began in 1982, I have spent long periods of research and teaching in China and Hong Kong. China’s shifting course has been a constant source of fascination, encouragement, and at times dismay. It is hard to imagine that the impoverished and unstable country of the 1970s would rise to become such a major economic power, one that despite its impressive expansion still faces intractable barriers to its future advancement.
This newly published book is the definitive account of the Tiananmen protest movement of 1989 and its suppression, which has turned out to be the pivotal political event in the post-Mao era. Weaving a range of personal stories and new documentation into a highly readable analysis, it lays bare its unpredictable course and tragic but avoidable outcome. There is nothing else in print that manages to describe the drama while providing a shrewd and cool-headed critical scrutiny of a range of competing scholarly interpretations and official misrepresentations.
The Tiananmen protests and Beijing massacre of 1989 were a major turning point in recent Chinese history. In this new analysis of 1989, Jeremy Brown tells the vivid stories of participants and victims, exploring the nationwide scope of the democracy movement and the brutal crackdown that crushed it. At each critical juncture in the spring of 1989, demonstrators and decision makers agonized over difficult choices and saw how events could have unfolded differently. The alternative paths that participants imagined confirm that bloodshed was neither inevitable nor necessary. Using a wide range of previously untapped sources and examining how ordinary citizens…
I’m a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland interested in politics, ethics, and art. Philosophers are often unpopular loners who are passionate about their ideas, and so are musicians like Bach. When I teach Socrates and the trial that led to his death I can’t help but think of Bach, who was rejected from job after job in favor of mediocrities, and whose music was considered offensive by parishioners and obsolete by musicians by the end of his life. These figures endear themselves to me not just because of the ideas themselves, but because they had to fight so hard for what they believed in.
I came to the piano as an adult and felt pretty sorry for myself–how am I supposed to do all this torturous practicing before and after work?
Then I read Zhu Xiao-Mei’s account of studying the piano during the Cultural Revolution, and realized what real commitment looks like. Zhu is a brilliant concert pianist who had to master Bach while practicing in a labor camp freezer. Read this tragi-comedy of China, politics, and Bach, and surmount your (room-temperature) challenges.
Zhu Xiao-Mei was born to middle-class parents in post-war China, and her musical proficiency became clear at an early age. Taught to play the piano by her mother, she developed quickly into a prodigy, immersing herself in the work of classical masters like Bach and Brahms. She was just eleven years old when she began a rigorous course of study at the Beijing Conservatory, laying the groundwork for what was sure to be an extraordinary career. But in 1966, when Xiao-Mei was seventeen, the Cultural Revolution began, and life as she knew it changed forever. One by one, her family…
I became interested in China-Africa relations fifteen years ago when I realised that the rise of the former was going to have major and long-lasting effects on the politics and economics of the continent. In a sense, the rising role of China in Africa foretold its rise to global power and influence. Since then I have been fascinated by the ways in which China has restructured, or been involved in the restructuring, of African economies and politics and the ways in which that country’s global strategies and roles have continued to evolve and their impacts. I have written several books on the impacts of emerging powers in Africa.
The ascent to power of Xi Jinxing in China in 2013 heralded a new era in China’s overseas engagements and in its domestic politics and economic policy; what Elizabeth Economy has called the “third revolution.” This fascinating book by Large brings the story of China’s engagements in Africa up to date. It is packed with fascinating details and analysis and shows how China’s interests on the continent are shifting from being primarily economic to being more geopolitical. It is a detailed and nuanced analysis of the changed nature of relations.
China has gone from being a marginal to a leading power in Africa in just over two decades. Its striking ascendancy in the continent is commonly thought to have been primarily driven by economic interests, especially resources like oil. This book argues instead that politics defines the 'new era' of China-Africa relations, and examines the importance of politics across a range of areas, from foreign policy to debt, development and the Xi Jinping incarnation of the China model.
Going beyond superficial depictions of China's engagement as predatory or benign, this book explores how Africa is - and isn't - integral…
I was born to privilege in Manhattan. A seeker from the get-go, I perpetually yearned to see below the surface of the pond and understand what lay beneath and how the world really works. Not connecting with Western philosophy, religion, or culture, I turned to the wisdom of the East at a young age. I stayed the course through decades of training in Chinese martial arts, eventually reached some understanding of them, and realized my spiritual ambitions when I was ordained a Daoist monk in China in an official government ceremony. I write about China then and now and teach meditation and tai chi around the world.
There is an argument to be made that Jin Yong (aka Louis Cha) is modern China’s version of William Shakespeare. From Cha’s unimaginably rich and bottomless imagination come unforgettable stories and characters that have had a huge impact on not only contemporary China but the rest of the world. Writing in the category of wuxia (martial arts fiction) he sold 100 million copies of his books, making him China’s most famous author. Countless films and TV shows have been based on his stories, that typically portray the under classes struggling against overlords. One of my favorite memories of travels in China was sitting at the tea house inside Hong Kong’s Peninsula hotel and spending the day reading this book and munching on dim sum. If I’d stepped out and been hit by a bus, I would have died a happy monk.
This is the first of a three-volume picaresque historical romance by China's best-loved author. It tells the story of Trinket, an irreverent and comic anti-hero, and his adventures through China and Chinese history, spanning more than twenty years at the beginning of the Qing dynasty.
