China's Culture

China's Culture gives a brief insight into Chinese culture covering topics such as China's ideology, ethics, morality, political and religious ideas, economic thought, ideas on obtaining material wealth, customs, science and technology, education, and literature and arts. China has a glorious history of civilization that spans thousands of years. Its culture is rich in content and heritage. Of the four ancient civilizations in the world, only the Chinese civilization has witnessed cultural continuity. The long-term continuation of the Chinese civilization has benefited from the three great processes of openness and integration. 

Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years

In this freewheeling, selective, iconoclastic history of the world from the 10th century to the present, Fernandez-Armesto concludes that the West's domination of global affairs was far from inevitable and is likely to abate as economic power and initiatives in technology and ideas shift decisively to Pacific rim nations. Editor of The Times Guide to the Peoples of Europe, the author first chronicles the slow, fitful consolidation of Islamic civilization, imperial China, medieval Europe and the Byzantine empire. The great age of European expansion unfolds here in a world full of aggressive competitors.

Return From The Stars

Hal Bregg is an astronaut who returns from a space mission in which only 10 biological years have passed for him, while 127 years have elapsed on earth. He finds that the earth has changed beyond recognition, filled with human beings who have been medically neutralized. How does an astronaut join a civilization that shuns risk? Translated by Barbara Marszal and Frank Simpson.

The Myth of American Exceptionalism

The notion of America as the divinely anointed homeland of freedom, bravery, democracy and economic opportunity, with everything to teach the world and nothing to learn from it, is so entrenched that this perceptive portrait of America the Ordinary seems downright radical. Hodgson (Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand) situates America as an outpost of Europe, always a part (and not always the most advanced part) of an evolving progressive, liberal, capitalist civilization spanning the Atlantic. American history, he contends, has its share of class conflict, bloody and sometimes losing struggles against hierarchy, and institutional dysfunction.

The Ego and His Own

Credited with influencing the philosophies of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand and the development of libertarianism and existentialism, this prophetic 1844 work challenges the very notion of a common good as the driving force of civilization. Stirner chronicles the battle of the individual against the collective to show how the latter invariably leads to oppression.