"A nonfiction account of some of the deadliest dictators in modern history"-- What makes a country fall to a dictator? How to authoritarian leaders acquire their powers? Davis profiles five of the most notoriously ruthless dictators in history. The examines their personal lives and historical periods, and shows how these factors shaped the leaders they'd become. -- adapted from jacket

"Blood Letters tells the astonishing tale of Lin Zhao, a poet and journalist arrested by the authorities in 1960 and executed eight years later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The only Chinese citizen known to have openly and steadfastly opposed communism under Mao, she rooted her dissent in her Christian faith--and expressed it in long, prophetic writings done in her own blood, and at times on her clothes and on cloth torn from her bedsheets."--Page...

It was long assumed that as China embraced open markets and private enterprise, its state-controlled economy would fall by the wayside, that free markets would inevitably lead to a more liberal society. Instead, China’s growth over the past four decades has positioned state capitalism as a durable foil to the orthodoxy of free markets, to the confusion of many in the West. Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao argue that China’s economic success...

This major new biography of Mao uses extensive Russian documents previously unavailable to biographers to reveal surprising details about Mao's rise to power and his leadership in China.

"A personal account of life in the orbit of Mao and Zhao En-Lai and one woman's effort to tell what it was like to be at the center of the storm. The history of China in the twentieth century is comprised of a long series of shocks: the 1911 revolution, the civil war between the communists and the nationalists, the Japanese invasion, the revolution, the various catastrophic campaigns initiated by Chairman Mao between 1949 and 1976, its great opening...

"As Jude Blanchette details in China's New Red Guards, two worrying trends in contemporary China point to Maoism's revival. First, an increasingly popular hard-edged form of nationalism that is reflexively anti-Western has taken root. The second is an unapologetic embrace of extreme authoritarianism that draws inspiration from the Maoist era. China's assertive stance in the South China Sea and anti-Japanese rhetoric represents the former, and the...