Asia Audiobooks | Travel

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

Coming this October: Killing Commendatore, the much-anticipated new novel from Haruki Murakami In this haunting work of journalistic investigation, Haruki Murakami tells the story of the horrific terrorist attack on Japanese soil that shook the entire world. On a clear spring day in 1995, five members of a religious cult unleashed poison gas on the Tokyo subway system. In attempt to discover why, Haruki Murakmi talks to the people who lived through the catastrophe, and in so doing lays bare the Japanese psyche. As he discerns the fundamental issues that led to the attack, Murakami paints a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere.

Haruki Murakami (Author), Feodor Chin, Ian Anthony Dale, Janet Song (Narrator)

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Street Without Joy: The French Debacle In Indochina

Journalist Bernard B. Fall describes the brutality and frustrations of the Indochina War, the savage eight-year conflict in which French forces suffered a staggering defeat at the hands of Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists. In this classic account of the French war in Indochina, Bernard B. Fall vividly captures the sights, sounds, and smells of the savage eight-year conflict in the jungles and mountains of Southeast Asia from 1946 to 1954. The French fought well to the last, but even with the lethal advantages of airpower, they could not stave off the Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists, who countered with a hit-and-run campaign of ambushes, booby traps, and nighttime raids. Defeat came at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, setting the stage for American involvement and opening another tragic chapter in Vietnam's history.

Bernard B. Fall (Author), Derek Perkins (Narrator)

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The Thirty Six Strategies of Ancient China

This is one of the most diverse yet accessible collections of Chinese strategies yet assembled. Brief in form, yet endless in wisdom, these fundamental rules of military engagement are easily adapted to the modern office, sports team, or everyday task. Taken from sources ranging from Lao Zi to Miyamoto Musashi, Stefan H. Verstappen has assembled a fascinating and impressive selection of historical and anecdotal evidence in support of this classic doctrine of strategy and one of the most influential works of East Asian philosophy. Whether you are a platoon commander or a weekend warrior, this book will enable you to stay three steps ahead.

Stefan H. Verstappen (Author), Stefan H. Verstappen (Narrator)

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Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds

“Bamboo is flexible, bending with the wind but never breaking, capable of adapting to any circumstance. It suggests resilience, meaning that we have the ability to bounce back even from the most difficult times.... Your ability to thrive depends, in the end, on your attitude to your life circumstances. Take everything in stride with grace, putting forth energy when it is needed, yet always staying calm inwardly.” (Ping Fu’s “Shanghai Papa”) Ping Fu knows what it’s like to be a child soldier, a factory worker, and a political prisoner. To be beaten and raped for the crime of being born into a well-educated family. To be deported with barely enough money for a plane ticket to a bewildering new land. To start all over, without family or friends, as a maid, waitress, and student. Ping Fu also knows what it’s like to be a pioneering software programmer, an innovator, a CEO, and Inc. magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year. To be a friend and mentor to some of the best-known names in technology. To build some of the coolest new products in the world. To give speeches that inspire huge crowds. To meet and advise the president of the United States. It sounds too unbelievable for fiction, but this is the true story of a life in two worlds. Born on the eve of China’s Cultural Revolution, Ping was separated from her family at the age of eight. She grew up fighting hunger and humiliation and shielding her younger sister from the teenagers in Mao’s Red Guard. At 25, she found her way to the United States; her only resources were $80 in traveler’s checks and three phrases of English: 'thank you', 'hello', and 'help'. Yet Ping persevered, and the hard-won lessons of her childhood guided her to success in her new homeland. Aided by her well-honed survival instincts, a few good friends, and the kindness of strangers, she grew into someone she never thought she’d be - a strong, independent, entrepreneurial leader. A love of problem-solving led her to computer science, and Ping became part of the team that created NCSA Mosaic, which became Netscape, the Web browser that forever changed how we access information. She then started a company, Geomagic, that has literally reshaped the world, from personalizing prosthetic limbs to repairing NASA spaceships. Bend, Not Break depicts a journey from imprisonment to freedom, and from the dogmatic anti-capitalism of Mao’s China to the high-stakes, take-no-prisoners world of technology start-ups in the United States. It is a tribute to one woman’s courage in the face of cruelty and a valuable lesson on the enduring power of resilience.

Meimei Fo, Meimei Fox, Ping Fu (Author), Robin Miles (Narrator)

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Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

Today, most Westerners still see the war in Afghanistan as a contest between democracy and Islamist fanaticism. That war is real, but it sits atop an older struggle between Kabul and the countryside, between order and chaos, between a modernist impulse to join the world and the pull of an older Afghanistan-a tribal universe of village republics permeated by Islam. Now, Tamim Ansary draws on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources to explain history from the inside out and to illuminate the long, internal struggle that the outside world has never fully understood. It is the story of a nation struggling to take form, a nation undermined by its own demons while every forty to sixty years a great power disrupts whatever progress has been made. Related in storytelling style, Games without Rules provides revelatory insight into a country at the center of political debate. "A breezy, accessible overview of centuries of messy Afghan history, including the present military quagmire...Lively instruction on how Afghanistan has coped, and continues to cope, with being a strategic flash point."-Kirkus Reviews

Tamim Ansary (Author), Tamim Ansary (Narrator)

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Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

Today, most Westerners still see the war in Afghanistan as a contest between democracy and Islamist fanaticism. That war is real, but it sits atop an older struggle between Kabul and the countryside, between order and chaos, between a modernist impulse to join the world and the pull of an older Afghanistan—a tribal universe of village republics permeated by Islam. Now, Tamim Ansary draws on his Afghan background, Muslim roots, and Western and Afghan sources to explain history from the inside out and illuminate the long, internal struggle that the outside world has never fully understood. It is the story of a nation struggling to take form, a nation undermined by its own demons while, every forty to sixty years, a great power crashes in and disrupts whatever progress has been made. Told in conversational, storytelling style and focusing on key events and personalities, Games without Rules provides revelatory insight into a country at the center of political debate.

Tamim Ansary (Author), Tamim Ansary (Narrator)

Audiobook

Midnight in Peking: The Murder That Haunted the Last Days of Old China

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Paul French's Midnight in Peking, a gripping, true murder mystery story read by the actor Crawford Logan. Who killed Pamela Werner? On a frozen night in January 1937, in the dying days of colonial Peking, a body was found under the haunted watchtower. It was Pamela Werner, the teenage daughter of the city's former British consul Edward Werner. Her heart had been removed. A horrified world followed the hunt for Pamela's killer, with a Chinese-British detective team pursuing suspects including a blood-soaked rickshaw puller, the Triads, and a lascivious grammar school headmaster. But the case was soon forgotten amid the carnage of the Japanese invasion... by all but Edward Werner. With a network of private investigators and informers, he followed the trail deep into Peking's notorious Badlands and back to the gilded hotels of the colonial Quarter. Some 75 years later, deep in the Scotland Yard archives, British historian Paul French accidentally came across the lost case file prepared by Edward Werner. Unveiling an undercover sex cult, heroin addicts and disappearing brothels, the truth behind the crime can now be told - and is more disturbing than anyone could imagine. Not just the unputdownable story of a savage murder, Midnight in Peking is a sweepingly evocative account of the end of an era.

Paul French (Author), Crawford Logan (Narrator)

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The Little Red Guard

In 1973, when Wenguang Huang was eight, his grandmother became obsessed with her own death. Fearing cremation, she appealed to her family to promise to bury her after she'd died. This was in Xi'an, a city in central China, at a time when a national ban on all traditional Chinese practices, including burials, was strictly enforced. But his grandmother was persistent, and two years later, Huang's father built her a coffin. Over the next fifteen years, the whole family was consumed with planning Grandma's burial, a regular source of friction and contention, with the constant risk of being caught by the authorities. Years later, Huang came to understand how much the coffin had influenced his upbringing and shaped the lives of everyone in the family.

Wenguang Huang (Author), Adam Verner (Narrator)

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The Search for Modern China

The history of China is as rich and strange as that of any country on earth. Yet for many, China’s history remains unknown, or known only through the stylized images that generations in the West have cherished or reviled as truth. With his command of character and event––the product of thirty years of research and reflection in the field––Spence dispels those myths in a powerful narrative. Over four centuries of Chinese history, from the waning days of the once-glorious Ming Dynasty to Deng Xiaoping’s bloody suppression of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, Spence fashions the astonishing story of the effort to achieve a modern China. Through the ideas and emotions of its reformist Confucian scholars, its poets, novelists, artists, and visionary students, we see one of the world’s oldest cultures struggling to define itself as Chinese and modern.

Jonathan D. Spence (Author), Frederick Davidson (Narrator)

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The Vietnam War: History in an Hour

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour.'War, what is it good for?' THE VIETNAM WAR: HISTORY IN AN HOUR gives a gripping account of the most important Cold War-era conflict, fought between the United States and the Viet Cong, the Vietnam People's Army and their Communist allies. It was one of the most traumatic military conflicts America has ever been involved in - and provoked a backlash of anti-war protests at home.Here are the key events leading up to the Vietnam War, the deadly guerrilla warfare of the Viet Cong, the domestic anti-war movement and the fall of Saigon. THE VIETNAM WAR: HISTORY IN AN HOUR is essential reading for anyone interested in post-war history.Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour...

Neil Smith (Author), Jonathan Keeble (Narrator)

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Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam

Invariably, armies are accused of preparing to fight the previous war. In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl-a veteran of both Operation Desert Storm and the conflict in Iraq-considers the now crucial question of how armies adapt to changing circumstances during the course of conflicts for which they are initially unprepared. Through the use of archival sources and interviews with participants in both engagements, Nagl compares the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice in the Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960 with what developed in the Vietnam War from 1950 to 1975. In examining these two events, Nagl argues that organizational culture is key to the ability to learn from unanticipated conditions, a variable which explains why the British army successfully conducted counterinsurgency in Malaya and why the American army failed to do so in Vietnam, treating the war instead as a conventional conflict. Nagl concludes that the British army, because of its role as a colonial police force and the organizational characteristics created by its history and national culture, was better able to quickly learn and apply the lessons of counterinsurgency during the course of the Malayan Emergency. With a new preface reflecting on the author's combat experience in Iraq, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife is a timely examination of the lessons of previous counterinsurgency campaigns that will be hailed by both military leaders and interested civilians.

John A. Nagl (Author), John Pruden (Narrator)

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China in Ten Words

From one of China's most acclaimed writers, his first work of nonfiction to appear in English: a unique, intimate look at the Chinese experience over the last several decades, told through personal stories and astute analysis that sharply illuminate the country's meteoric economic and social transformation. Framed by ten phrases common in the Chinese vernacular-"people," "leader," "reading," "writing," "Lu Xun" (one of the most influential Chinese writers of the twentieth century), "disparity," "revolution," "grassroots," "copycat," and "bamboozle"-China in Ten Words reveals as never before the world's most populous yet oft-misunderstood nation. In "Disparity," for example, Yu Hua illustrates the mind-boggling economic gaps that separate citizens of the country. In "Copycat," he depicts the escalating trend of piracy and imitation as a creative new form of revolutionary action. And in "Bamboozle," he describes the increasingly brazen practices of trickery, fraud, and chicanery that are, he suggests, becoming a way of life at every level of society. Characterized by Yu Hua's trademark wit, insight, and courage, China in Ten Words is a refreshingly candid vision of the "Chinese miracle" and all its consequences, from the singularly invaluable perspective of a writer living in China today.

Yu Hua (Author), Don Hagen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Asia Audiobooks in Travel