Asian History

The Art of War, written in China during the fifth century BCE by military expert Sun Tzu, has been favored reading among soldiers and strategists for two millennia. Its concise 13 chapters, studied to this day by world leaders and generals from Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong to US Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell, teach victory through studying the opponent, building impregnable defenses, confusing the enemy with diversions, and attacking forcefully its weak spots. The book... Read The Art of War Summary

The artist and writer Thi Bui published her autobiographical graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, in 2017. Alternating her narrative between her present-day experiences as a new mother in New York City with her parents’ past growing up in and then escaping from Vietnam, Bui builds a complex web of intergenerational trauma and love. This is Bui’s first venture into comic book illustration. The artwork that accompanies her narrative is based on the black... Read The Best We Could Do Summary

The Black Echo (1992) is Michael Connelly’s first novel and the first book in the long-running series featuring Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch. It won the 1993 Edgar Award for Best First Novel and is now a classic in the modern crime genre. Connelly, who worked as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times while starting his career as a novelist, has written over 37 novels, including 24 featuring Detective Bosch. His works... Read The Black Echo Summary

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The Death of Woman Wang by Jonathan Spence is a nonfiction history focusing on four crises in 17th-century rural China: problems with tax collection; a widow struggling to protect her child and inheritance from her husband’s relatives; a bloody feud; and the attempt of a woman named Wang to leave her husband.It is from the last topic that the book takes its title. Although Spence does not use the term himself, The Death of Woman... Read The Death of Woman Wang Summary

A measure of the quality, prescience, and veracity of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth is that, nearly a century after its first publication, the book remains required reading in literature, world history, and social science courses. The novel is a simple, straightforward narrative about 50 years in the life of Wang Lung, an uneducated farmer in eastern China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While this era period was one of continual... Read The Good Earth Summary

The Happiest Refugee is a 2010 autobiography by Vietnamese-born, Australian author, actor, comedian, and artist Anh Do. Following his journey from a perilous escape from Communist-ruled Vietnam as a toddler with his large family, to his working-class childhood in Australia where he struggled to fit into the predominantly white society, to his rise as one of Australia’s most sought-after comedians and motivational speakers, The Happiest Refugee is considered one of the most well-received stories of... Read The Happiest Refugee Summary

The Housekeeper and the Professor, written by Yōko Ogawa, is a work of literary fiction set in modern-day Japan and loosely based on the book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a biography of the mathematician Paul Erdös. The Housekeeper and the Professor was originally published in Japanese in 2003; it sold more than one million copies and received the Hon’ya Taisho award in 2004. In 2006, it was adapted into a film version, titled... Read The Housekeeper and the Professor Summary

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The Latehomecomer, a memoir by Kao Kalia Yang, was published in 2008. It won the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award for Nonfiction. Yang was born in Thailand’s Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in 1980 and immigrated to St. Paul, Minnesota when she was six years old. She is a graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University and co-founder of Words Wanted, an organization committed to helping immigrants with... Read The Latehomecomer Summary

The Story of My Experiments with Truth is the autobiography of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, more widely known as Mahatma Gandhi. A key political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian independence movement, Gandhi penned this work to narrate his quest for truth and the principles that underpinned his life’s journey. Originally published in 1927, this memoir provides a meticulous account of Gandhi’s spiritual, moral, and political evolution. The literary era in which this was... Read The Story of My Experiments with Truth Summary

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Pramoedya Ananta Toer—a famous Indonesian editor, essayist, and social activist—wrote This Earth of Mankind (1980)—the first book of his series The Buru Quartet—while imprisoned in the Buru Concentration Camp following a military coup that overthrew Sukarno, the first democratically elected president of Indonesia. Incarcerated for 14 years and prevented from having writing material, Toer memorized the books of his series and recited them to his fellow inmates each day until his release in 1979. The... Read This Earth of Mankind Summary

To Live, a 1993 realist novel by renowned Chinese author Yu Hua, traces the struggles of protagonist Fugui and his family. Instead of using traditional chapters, the novel is broken into italicized and non-italicized sections based on whether Fugui or his unnamed interlocutor is narrating. Spanning over four decades of modern Chinese history, including the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists (1945-49), the founding of the People’s Republic... Read To Live Summary

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