Asia Books - Page 5

Lonely Planet India

Bryn Thomas, David Collins, Rob Flynn, Christine Niven, Sarina Singh, Dani Valent

List Price: $25.95 By: Lonely Planet Publications Amazon Marketplace: 14 new & used starting at $0.46

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 60 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Buy another book 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I was one of those people who took lonely planet books everywhere, all over Europe, to Iceland, the Philippines, Cuba and now Delhi. I trusted the brand so it was the only book I brought, big mistake.
I'll only speak for Delhi because thats where I spent two weeks. So I hope this specifically helps travelers to Delhi.

The restaurants were pretty much awful, the hotel prices were wrong, the massage treatment place recommended so out of the way that it cost the cost of the massage to get there and back. I was working so I only wasted my weekends following the book. My work lunches were at far better restaurants and a aimless walk in the daytime in Old Delhi was far better than any guided tour. I also didn't appreciate the tone of this book and how much time it wasted on smug reviews and lame humor.
I think the individual country books depend really on the authors/editors, the other lonely planet guides I have were of great help. For India(or Delhi at least), try another title.

Editorial Review:

India promises travel on a grand scale: colorful, exciting, at times exasperating, but never dull. This bestselling and indispensable guide is revered for its practical information on the complexities of travel in India, exquisitely detailed maps, good-value listings for all budgets, and essential advice on Indian culture, solo travel, language, and bargaining color. 200 maps.

China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power

Rob Gifford

Amazon Price: $17.79 List Price: $26.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Random House Amazon Marketplace: 66 new & used starting at $5.64

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 62 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Route 312 is the Chinese Route 66. It flows three thousand miles from east to west, passing through the factory towns of the coastal areas, through the rural heart of China, then up into the Gobi Desert, where it merges with the Old Silk Road. The highway witnesses every part of the social and economic revolution that is turning China upside down.

In this utterly surprising and deeply personal book, acclaimed National Public Radio reporter Rob Gifford, a fluent Mandarin speaker, takes the dramatic journey along Route 312 from its start in the boomtown of Shanghai to its end on the border with Kazakhstan. Gifford reveals the rich mosaic of modern Chinese life in all its contradictions, as he poses the crucial questions that all of us are asking about China: Will it really be the next global superpower? Is it as solid and as powerful as it looks from the outside? And who are the ordinary Chinese people, to whom the twenty-first century is supposed to belong?

Gifford is not alone on his journey. The largest migration in human history is taking place along highways such as Route 312, as tens of millions of people leave their homes in search of work. He sees signs of the booming urban economy everywhere, but he also uncovers many of the country’s frailties, and some of the deep-seated problems that could derail China’s rise.

The whole compelling adventure is told through the cast of colorful characters Gifford meets: garrulous talk-show hosts and ambitious yuppies, impoverished peasants and tragic prostitutes, cell-phone salesmen, AIDS patients, and Tibetan monks. He rides with members of a Shanghai jeep club, hitchhikes across the Gobi desert, and sings karaoke with migrant workers at truck stops along the way.

As he recounts his travels along Route 312, Rob Gifford gives a face to what has historically, for Westerners, been a faceless country and breathes life into a nation that is so often reduced to economic statistics. Finally, he sounds a warning that all is not well in the Chinese heartlands, that serious problems lie ahead, and that the future of the West has become inextricably linked with the fate of 1.3 billion Chinese people.

“Informative, delightful, and powerfully moving . . . Rob Gifford’s acute powers of observation, his sense of humor and adventure, and his determination to explore the wrenching dilemmas of China’s explosive development open readers’ eyes and reward their minds.”
–Robert A. Kapp, president, U.S.-China Business Council, 1994-2004

Shadow of the Silk Road (P.S.)

Colin Thubron

Amazon Price: $10.85 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harper Perennial Amazon Marketplace: 52 new & used starting at $8.53

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Un libro hipnotizante 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

El Sr. Thubron es un viajero de antiguo cuño. No usa máquinas fotográficas. Si es que toma algunos apuntes, me imagino que lo hace sobre una Moleskine. Allí,tal vez, también dibuja. Educado en Eton y Oxford, su prosa es elegante y maravillosa. Hipnotiza al lector. Calla para dejar que los propios personajes hablen. Ha gastado su vida en Asia. Su conocimento llega al grado de la erudición, aunque nunca intimida con ello.
Lo veo en la línea de un Patrick Leigh Fermor o de R. Kapukzinski.
Se lo recomiendo, fervientemente.

Editorial Review:

To travel the Silk Road, the greatest land route on earth, is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions, and inventions. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart, and camel, Colin Thubron covered some seven thousand miles in eight months—out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey—and explored an ancient world in modern ferment.

The Great Upheaval CD: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800

Jay Winik

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Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 47 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

It is an era that redefined history. As the 1790s began, a fragile America teetered on the brink of oblivion, Russia towered as a vast imperial power, and France plunged into monumental revolution. But none of these remarkable events occurred in isolation. In The Great Upheaval, acclaimed historian Jay Winik masterfully illuminates how their fates combined in one extraordinary moment to change the course of civilization.

Winik brings his vast, meticulous research and narrative genius to the cold, dark battlefields and deadly clashes of ideologies that defined this age. Here is a savage world war, the toppling of a great dynasty, and an America struggling to survive at home and abroad. Here, too, is the first modern Holy War between Islam and a resurgent Christian empire. And here is the richest cast of characters ever to walk upon the world stage: Washington and Jefferson, Louis XVI and Robespierre, Catherine the Great, Adams, Napoleon, and Selim III. Exquisitely written and utterly compelling, The Great Upheaval vividly depicts an arc of revolutionary fervor stretching from Philadelphia and Paris to St. Petersburg and Cairo—with fateful results. A landmark in historical literature, Winik's gripping, epic portrait of this tumultuous decade will forever transform the way we see America's beginnings and our world.

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present

Michael B Oren

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 97 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Informative, almost entertaining 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I found this a fascinating if somewhat redundant accounting of the U.S. involvement with the Middle East since our nation's birth. Many of the historical anecdotes are almost chilling in their forshadowing of events of the last few years.
I'd recommend it if your a solid history and politics student.

Interesting and informative 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

"Power, Faith, and Fantasy" is worth buying. Given the major role the Middle East is playing in world affairs today, it pays to learn more about the history behind current events. This book will give it to you. I travel to that part of the world on occasion and wanted to learn more about it. The book satisfied my need in that regard.

Oren's writing style is clear, albeit at times with a few pretentious vocabulary choices. He does a good job of extracting history by using many stories. This narrative quilt works reasonably well most of the time, but sometimes leaves you wanting a more linear approach. Stories, however, are entertaining and that keeps you coming back for more. One of Oren's favorite tactics (that wears thin eventually) is to take you down one path -- 'things are looking bad, but ... there are some good things about to happen.' This back flipping is his way of balancing events. After awhile you get to expect the other shoe to drop and the device loses its effectiveness. However, the 600 pages are rarely boring and the amount of U.S. history behind the Middle East is unexpectedly enlightening.

In the end, you'll discover the book lives exactly up to its title in what Oren stresses. The U.S. government is constantly bedeviled by how to treat Arab/Muslim countries when there is such a cultural and religious difference. There is no way to "win" politically, morally, militarily, or popularly. The missionaries are frustrated by an inability to covert locals and switch to humanitarian care when not dying from disease or being attacked by natives. The U.S. population is enamored of the image of the nomadic and sensuous Arabs and easily enticed by cheap imagery. Until 911 that is.

Oren helps us understand the complex mix that makes the Middle East a place of shifting sands both physically and politically. See if you don't come away concluding the Jews and the Arabs will never reconcile over Israel. A perverse conclusion (mine, not his) from Oren's work is that the state of Israel is really Hitler's "final solution" -- a sort of simmering residual holocaust waiting to reignite.

You are now free to click the "order" button.

Editorial Review:

This is the first comprehensive history of America's involvement in the Middle East from George Washington to George W. Bush. Drawing on thousands of government documents and personal letters, this book reconstructs the diverse and remarkable ways in which Americans have interacted with this alluring yet often hostile land. Covering over 230 years of history, Power, Faith, and Fantasy is an indispensable work for anyone interested in understanding the roots of America's Middle East involvement today.

Young Stalin (Vintage)

Simon Sebag Montefiore

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Stalin The Priest 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

First of all this is probably the best non-fiction book I've read in recent memory. Montefiore's portrait of a young criminal virtuoso measures up favourably to some of the best biographies ever written, works like Sylvia Nasar's 'A Beautiful Mind' and Martin Gilbert's 'Churchill', .

The style of writing is unique in that it is both direct and elegant, a combination of clipped factual biography and sensational prose that succeeds in turning a historical document into a novel that puts your modern day bestselling thriller to shame (I'm looking at you Da Vinci Code). Stalin's days growing up in a provincial Georgian town, from the traditional yearly town brawls, to being a choirboy in the church, to fomenting anarchy in the seminary after his discovery of Marxism (Stalin probably wouldn't have made a great priest anyway), the author's diligently researched work gives the reader an often hilarious portrait of a surprisingly likeable young Georgian who, with some luck and charisma, just happened to become one of the most callous and paranoid autocrats in the history of the Russian empire.

I thought it unfortunate that the author didn't really expand upon the particular brand of Marxism that Stalin espoused. Although to be fair he does remark that Stalin could quote and paraphrase Marx effectively enough to convince anyone of the cogency of his arguments, which is probably more revealing than any ideological claims. Like most fanatics, he expropriated the facts that suited him. In any case the book is about the Stalin, and not the revolution or Marxism.

Another difficulty that people might encounter is the deluge of Georgian and Russian names that flit in and out of Stalin's life. Spandarian, Shaumian, Egnatashvili, Davrichewy, Alliluyeva, Svanidze, Mukhtarov, Sverdlov, Lunarcharsky, Dybenko, Kamenev...keeping track of everyone is like being Kirstie Alley's nutritionist, the shear quantitiy and variety is overwhelming. Sometimes people show up just so they can get killed a few pages later, but I suppose we can blame Stalin for that and not Sebag-Montefiore. In any case the author is adept at separating the important figures from more minor actors, without wasting much space on repetition or lengthy digressions.

A few minor editing mistakes and the aforementioned quibbles however, do not detract from the fact that this is a first rate work of scholarship and writing. Easy five stars.

Editorial Review:

Based on ten years' astonishing new research, here is the thrilling story of how a charismatic, dangerous boy became a student priest, romantic poet, gangster mastermind, prolific lover, murderous revolutionary, and the merciless politician who shaped the Soviet Empire in his own brutal image: How Stalin became Stalin.

Marine Sniper: 93 Confirmed Kills

Charles Henderson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 212 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great read 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I was in the Marine Corp in the late 60s but was fortunate not to make a tour in Nam. Lost quite a few good friends over there.

Saw this book mentioned on the web and couldn't wait to get it. A great moving story of someone we should be grateful to. Many men and women sacrificed their lives for us back here. Just hope people appreciate it.

Couldn't put it down. Well written and enlightening.

Wally

Editorial Review:

In the chaos of the combat zone, there are the living, the dead, and the Ghost.

In the ongoing Iraq conflict, there are no battle lines, no direct offensives, no ground won or lost––just the daily fight against an enemy who hits and runs, hides and sneaks. If the enemy shows himself, it’s only for a moment. But for a Marine Sniper, that is all that is needed.

Readers now have the opportunity, from these warriors’ perspective, to peer into the killing zone through a telescopic lens, down the barrel of a high-powered rifle, and into the very heart of the enemy. The training, the techniques, and the steel will necessary to survive as a sniper are all described in vivid detail.

Charles Henderson also delves into the core of the enemy––the maniacal ideology, and the tactics that have sown so much violence in Iraq––and how they are all vulnerable to a single bullet from a Ghost.

No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah

Bing West

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 119 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"This is the face of war as only those who have fought it can describe it."–Senator John McCain

Fallujah: Iraq’s most dangerous city unexpectedly emerged as the major battleground of the Iraqi insurgency. For twenty months, one American battalion after another tried to quell the violence, culminating in a bloody, full-scale assault. Victory came at a terrible price: 151 Americans and thousands of Iraqis were left dead.

The epic battle for Fallujah revealed the startling connections between policy and combat that are a part of the new reality of war.

The Marines had planned to slip into Fallujah “as soft as fog.” But after four American contractors were brutally murdered, President Bush ordered an attack on the city–against the advice of the Marines. The assault sparked a political firestorm, and the Marines were forced to withdraw amid controversy and confusion–only to be ordered a second time to take a city that had become an inferno of hate and the lair of the archterrorist al-Zarqawi.

Based on months spent with the battalions in Fallujah and hundreds of interviews at every level–senior policymakers, negotiators, generals, and soldiers and Marines on the front lines–No True Glory is a testament to the bravery of the American soldier and a cautionary tale about the complex–and often costly–interconnected roles of policy, politics, and battle in the twenty-first century.

From Beirut to Jerusalem

Thomas L. Friedman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 180 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Understanding The Middle East 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I have always admired Thomas Friedman as an insightful writer of truth. Although a Jew his writing is impartial. He clearly states that he has friends both Israeli and Arab, and has been criticized by his American countrymen. I have often wondered why his opinions are not solicited by U.S. government officials, but perhaps no one wants to face the truth that on all sides of the Middle Eastern difficulties there are human beings whose opinions need to be heard and their concerns recognized.

In an spellbinding anecdotal presentation of the facts Mr. Friedman treats the reader with substance often lacking in the usual reporting that at best presents a few highlights of daily events.

Kenneth Ray Taylor author of Standup Comedian: The Secret and Beyond

Editorial Review:

Winner of the 1989 National Book Award for nonfiction, this extraordinary bestseller is still the most incisive, thought-provoking book ever written about the Middle East. Thomas L. Friedman, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, and now the Foreign Affairs columnist on the op-ed page of the New York Times, drew on his ten years in the Middle East to write a book that The Wall Street Journal called "a sparkling intellectual guidebook... an engrossing journey not to be missed." Now with a new chapter that brings the ever-changing history of the conflict in the Middle East up to date, this seminal historical work reaffirms both its timeliness and its timelessness. "If you're only going to read one book on the Middle East, this is it." -- Seymour Hersh. "From Beirut To Jerusalem is the most intelligent and comprehensive account one is likely to read." -- New York Times Book Review.

Blind Man's Bluff

Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew

List Price: $18.60 By: Arrow Books Ltd Amazon Marketplace: 18 new & used starting at $2.43

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 317 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Super popular for a reason 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

By no means a work of fine literature, this is still one of the best times I have had reading a book. Since I read it mostly in airplanes and airports, the following formed part of my experience - never in my life have so many people walked up to me and told me how much they loved a book I was reading.

Great stuff, very interesting. Reading this makes me think my own job is barely a step above washing dishes in the hierarchy of manly activities. Hats off, boys!

If you have any interest in the military, history, or military history, this should be an immediate purchase. Then, go check out the Great Game to see how spying on the Russians worked in the 18th and 19th centuries...

Editorial Review:

For decades American submarines have roamed the depths in a dangerous battle for information and advantage in missions known only to a select few. Now, after six years of research, those missions are told in Blind Man's Bluff, a magnificent achievement in investigative reporting. It reads like a spy thriller -- except everything in it is true. This is an epic of adventure, ingenuity, courage, and disaster beneath the sea, a story filled with unforgettable characters who engineered daring missions to tap the enemy's underwater communications cables and to shadow Soviet submarines. It is a story of heroes and spies, of bravery and tragedy.