"The Mitrokhin Archive" tells for the first time in full the startling story of Soviet attempts to infiltrate the West. Working from Vasili Mitrokhin's archive and his own unrivalled expertise in the history of intelligence, Christopher Andrew has created an extraordinary picture of a USSR committed to covert activity at home and abroad to maintain Communism. From technological...(展开全部)

The East in the West reassesses Western views of Asia. Traditionally many European historians and theorists have seen the societies of the East as 'static' or 'backward'. Jack Goody challenges these assumptions, beginning with the notion of a special Western rationality which enabled 'us' and not 'them' to modernise. He then turns to book-keeping, which several social and econo...(展开全部)

This interesting book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed native ethnic Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 unti...(展开全部)

In the years after Wrold War II, Westerners and Japanese alike elevated Zen to the quintessence of spirituality in Japan. Pursuing the sources of Zen as a Japanese ideal, Shoji Yamada uncovers the surprising role of two cultural touchstones: Eugen Herrigel's "Zen in the Art of Archery" and the Ryoanji dry-landscape rock garden. Yamada shows how both became facile conduits for e...(展开全部)

If in the year 1411 you had been able to circumnavigate the globe, you would have been most impressed by the dazzling civilizations of the Orient. The Forbidden City was under construction in Ming Beijing; in the Near East, the Ottomans were closing in on Constantinople. By contrast, England would have struck you as a miserable backwater ravaged by plague, bad sanitation and in...(展开全部)

In the course of the Cold War, architects, planners, and construction companies from socialist Eastern Europe engaged in a vibrant collaboration with those in West Africa and the Middle East in order to bring modernization to the developing world. Architecture in Global Socialism shows how their collaboration reshaped five cities in the Global South: Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu ...(展开全部)

In the popular imagination, archives are remote, largely obsolete institutions: either antiquated, inevitably dusty libraries or sinister repositories of personal secrets maintained by police states. Yet the archive is now a ubiquitous feature of digital life. Rather than being deleted, e-mails and other computer files are archived. Media software and cloud storage allow for th...(展开全部)