This paperback edition presents a compelling narrative of the Pacific War through the dramatic and unforgettable stories of nine heroic Americans, highlighting their bravery and experiences during this pivotal conflict.
"Bradley is sharp and rueful, and a voice for a more seasoned, constructive vision of our international relations with East Asia." --Christian Science Monitor James Bradley introduces us to the prominent Americans--including FDR's grandfather, Warren Delano--who in the 1800s made their fortunes in the China opium trade. Meanwhile, American missionaries sought a myth: noble Chinese peasants eager to Westernize. The media propagated this mirage, and FDR believed that supporting Chiang Kai-shek would make China America's best friend in Asia. But Chiang was on his way out and when Mao Zedong instead came to power, Americans were shocked, wondering how we had "lost China." From the 1850s to the origins of the Vietnam War, Bradley reveals how American misconceptions about China have distorted our policies and led to the avoidable deaths of millions. The China Mirage dynamically explores the troubled history that still defines U.S.-Chinese relations today.
'Wise, compassionate, and urgent.' Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland A Bookseller Nonfiction Editor's Choice for March 2024 Plunge into the depths of the unknown in this thrilling work of nonfiction that combines science, history, and nature writing to explore the deepest recesses of the natural world. Oceans created, shaped, and sustain not just human life, but all life on Earth, and perhaps beyond it. They are our history -- from evolution to exploration and colonialism; our present -- from beach holidays to transporting food and goods; and, as rising sea levels and warming water reshape coastlines and the climate, our future. Deep Wateris a reckoning with humankind's complex relationship with the ocean, a book shaped by tidal movements and vast currents, and lit by the presence of other minds and other ways of being. It speaks directly and uncompromisingly of the urgency of the environmental catastrophe that is overtaking us, but is also suffused with the glories of the ocean, and alert to the extraordinary efforts of the scientists and researchers whose work helps us understand its secrets. Immense in scope but also profoundly personal, it offers vital new ways of understanding humanity's place on our planet, and shows that the oceans might yet save us all.
In this remarkably powerful book, James Bradley takes as his starting point one of the most famous photographs of all time. In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima and into a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire from 22,000 Japanese. After climbing through a hellish landscape and on to the island's highest peak, six men were photographed raising the stars and stripes. One of those soldiers was the author's father, John Bradley. He never spoke to his family about the photograph or about the war, but after his death in 1994, they discovered closed boxes of letters and photos which James Bradley draws on to retrace the lives of his father and his five companions. Following these men's paths to Iwo Jima, Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific's most crucial island - an island riddled with sixteen miles of tunnels and defended by Japanese soldiers determined to fight to the death. In the thirty-six days of fighting, almost fifty-thousand men lost their lives. Above all a human - and personal - story, few books have captured so brilliantly or so movingly the complexity of war and its aftermath and the true meaning of heroism.
Set between Hong Kong and Sydney at the beginning of the next century, this is a novel about time, blindness and chaos, played out against the backdrop of a world poised on the brink of total collapse. Anna, a photographer, becomes interested in fossils and their preservation of form across geological time. She encounters Seth, a blind palaeontologist, whose very different sensory world leads her to new departures in her work. Anna and Seth gradually admit each other into their very private worlds. But Anna's involvement with Seth's sister and her anti-government protests is ultimately to have tragic consequences.
As humanity faces the urgency of climate crisis, it is hubris versus hope when Kate Larkin joins a secret project to save the world by resurrecting a ghost species, the Neanderthals. But when the child Eve is born, Kate's role as scientist, and mother, forces her to ask what really makes us, and Eve, human?
On the success of his two bestselling books about World War II, James Bradley began to wonder what the real catalyst was for the Pacific War. What he discovered shocked him. In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Taft, his daughter Alice, and a gaggle of congressmen on a mission to Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea with the intent of forging an agreement to divide up Asia. This clandestine pact lit the fuse that would-decades later-result in a number of devastating wars: WWII, the Korean War, and the communist revolution in China. In 2005, James Bradley retraced that epic voyage and discovered the remarkable truth about America's vast imperial past. Full of fascinating characters brought brilliantly to life, The Imperial Cruise will powerfully revise the way we understand U.S. history.
Moving and nuanced characterizations distinguish this subtle look at an Earth suffering the consequences of climate collapse. -Publishers Weekly Starred Review Bleak and hopeful in equal measure, Clade is a striking paradox of a book-a soothing tale of the coming apocalypse. -BookPage Bradley moves quickly through the lives of his protagonists, sketching their stories during key moments in the unfolding narrative. But the real story here is the all-too- realistic vision of an ecosystem in the throes of collapse,portrayed in stunning, sobering detail. -Booklist a stunningly beautiful novel, characterized as much by lyricism as pointed critique of how humans are stewarding the planet. -Chicago Review of Books Novels like Clade provide the lens we need to see our way forward. -Locus entertaining, insightful, and all around a great book -Gamers Sphere Barnes & Noble SFF blog: haunting, strangely optimistic Bradley's ability to find poetry amid brutal circumstances, his focus on the undeniably human problems of his cast, and a hopeful message of survival make Clade a melancholic celebration of humanity, not an elegy Bradley's novel is absorbing and depressing, as it is thoughtful and fascinating
Concentrating on the crucial and the seemingly insignificant, historians offer an alternative history and take a provocative look at the way our world could easily have been. For example, what if William hadn't conquered?
