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Entertaining and masterly biography of Madame Chiang Kai-shek - the woman who built modern China. THE LAST EMPRESS revolves around a fascinating, manipulative woman and her family who were largely responsible for dragging China into the modern world. Soong May-ling, or Madame Chiang as she was known, is uniquely positioned at the heart of this story. As her husband came to represent the hopes of the West in the East, she acted as his adviser, English translator, secretary, and most loyal champion, finding herself on the world stage with Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. A savvy politician, she remained a popular if controversial figure both at home and abroad. Hannah Pakula brilliantly narrates the life of this extraordinary woman - how she charmed the United States out of billions of dollars while remaining dedicated to her China, and how she managed to influence if not change the history of the twentieth century.
"First published by Princeton in 1943, the collection of essays that constituted Makers of Modern Strategy has largely held the field as the key book that studied the means and ends of military power and thought, and the historical figures that shaped that history. The books, in two editions, have long been a staple of Princeton's backlist in international politics and strategic studies. The first edition, edited by Edward Mead Earle and subtitled Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, emerged out of a seminar of foreign policy and security experts organized between Princeton and the Institute of Advanced Study in reaction to World War II as a global conflict. The subsequent edition, e...
Wafer-scale integration has long been the dream of system designers. Instead of chopping a wafer into a few hundred or a few thousand chips, one would just connect the circuits on the entire wafer. What an enormous capability wafer-scale integration would offer: all those millions of circuits connected by high-speed on-chip wires. Unfortunately, the best known optical systems can provide suitably ?ne resolution only over an area much smaller than a whole wafer. There is no known way to pattern a whole wafer with transistors and wires small enough for modern circuits. Statistical defects present a ?rmer barrier to wafer-scale integration. Flaws appear regularly in integrated circuits; the lar...
Groundwater is one of the most important resources in the world. In many areas, water supplies for industrial, domestic, and agricultural uses are de pendent on groundwater. As an "open" system, groundwater may exchange mass and energy with its neighboring systems (soil, air, and surface water) through adsorption, ion-exchange, infiltration, evaporation, inflow, outflow, and other exchange forms. Consequently, both the quantity and quality of groundwater may vary with environmental changes and human activities. Due to population growth, and industrial and agricultural development, more and more groundwater is extracted, especially in arid areas. If the groundwater management problem is not seriously considered, over extraction may lead to groundwater mining, salt water intrusion, and land subsidence. In fact, the quality of groundwater is gradually deteriorating throughout the world. The problem of groundwater pollution has appeared, not only in developed countries, but also in developing countries. Ground water pollution is a serious environmental problem that may damage human health, destroy the ecosystem, and cause water shortage.
The rapid growth of the field of international political economy since the 1970s has revived an older tradition of thought from the pre-1945 era. The Contested World Economy provides the first book-length analysis of these deep intellectual roots of the field, revealing how earlier debates about the world economy were more global and wide-ranging than usually recognized. Helleiner shows how pre-1945 pioneers of international political economy included thinkers from all parts of the world rather than just those from Europe and the United States featured in most textbooks. Their discussions also went beyond the much-studied debate between economic liberals, neomercantilists, and Marxists, and addressed wider topics, including many with contemporary relevance, such as environmental degradation, gender inequality, racial discrimination, religious worldviews, civilizational values, national self-sufficiency, and varieties of economic regionalism. This fascinating history of ideas sheds new light on current debates and the need for a global understanding of their antecedents.
"Popular operas in late imperial China were a major part of daily entertainment, and were also important for transmitting knowledge of Chinese culture and values. In the twentieth century, however, Chinese operas went through significant changes. During the first four decades of the 1900s, led by Xin Wutai (New Stage) of Shanghai and Yisushe of Xi’an, theaters all over China experimented with both stage and scripts to present bold new plays centering on social reform. Operas became closely intertwined with social and political issues. This trend toward “politicization” was to become the most dominant theme of Chinese opera from the 1930s to the 1970s, when ideology-laden political play...
Nationalists think about the economy, Marvin Suesse argues, and this thinking matters once nationalists hold political power. Many nationalists seek to limit global exchange, but others prioritise economic development. The potential conflict between these two goals shapes nationalist policy making. Drawing on historical case studies from thirty countries – from the American Revolution to the rise of China – this book paints a broad panorama of economic nationalism over the past 250 years. It explains why such thinking has become influential, despite the internal contradictions and chequered record of many nationalist policy makers. At the root of economic nationalism's appeal is its ability to capitalise upon economic inequality, both domestic and international. These inequalities are reinforced by political factors such as empire building, ethnic conflicts, and financial crises. This has given rise to powerful nationalist movements that have decisively shaped the global exchange of goods, people, and capital.