"'It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution,' Tania Branigan writes. During this decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976, children turned on parents, students condemned teachers, and as many as two million people died for their supposed political sins, while tens of millions were hounded, ostracized, and imprisoned. Yet in China this brutal and turbulent period exists, for the most part, as...

A woman who grew up in China during its Cultural Revolution describes the grueling physical labor she endured on Red Fire Farm, her forced segregation from men, her sexual relationship with her platoon leader, and her introduction to acting.

"After ten years of reporting from central Africa for The New York Times, Associated Press, and others, Anjan Sundaram finds himself living a quiet life in Shippagan, Canada, with his wife and newborn. But when word arrives of preparations for ethnic cleansing in the Central African Republic, he is suddenly torn between his duty as a husband and father, and his moral responsibility to report on a conflict unseen by the world. Soon he is traveling...

When veteran war reporter Benjamin Hall woke up in Kyiv on the morning of March 14, 2022, he had no idea that, within hours, Russian bombs would nearly end his life. As a journalist for Fox News, Hall had worked in dangerous war zones like Syria and Afghanistan, but with three young daughters at home, life on the edge was supposed to be a thing of the past. Yet when Russia viciously attacked Ukraine in February 2022, Hall quickly volunteered to go....

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's brutally honest account of his experience as a militiaman during the Spanish Civil War. In the last days of 1936, Spain was five months into a bitter civil war, in which volunteers from many countries were helping the elected government of the Spanish Republic battle a military coup led by General Francisco Franco and backed by Hitler and Mussolini. Some foreigners flocking to Spain had come for another reason:...

When Marines enter an abandoned house in Fallujah, Iraq, and hear a suspicious noise, they clench their weapons, edge around the corner, and prepare to open fire. What they find during the U.S.–led attack on the "most dangerous city on Earth" in late 2004, however, is not an insurgent but a puppy left behind when most of the city's residents fled. Despite military law forbidding pets, the Marines de-flea the pup with kerosene, de-worm him

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"When she left Bengal and settled in London, Lipika Pelham was seeking the freedom to choose her own identity in the world. However, the moment she met her future husband, that search for identity would become more fraught and complicated than she had ever imagined possible. She was a Bengali-Indian-Bangladeshi with a Hindu-Muslim background; he was a Jew with a passion for Arab-Jewish coexistence in the Middle East. They married, pursued careers...

Practicing nurse and New York Times columnist Theresa Brown invites readers to experience not just a day in the life of a nurse but all the life that happens in just one day on a hospital cancer ward. In her skilled hands, as both a dedicated nurse and an insightful chronicler of events, we are given an unprecedented view into the individual struggles as well as the larger truths about medicine in this country, and by the end of the shift, we have...

The Battle of Dunkirk, in May/June 1940, is remembered as a stunning defeat, yet a major victory as well. The Nazis had beaten back the Allies and pushed them across France to the northern port of Dunkirk. In the ultimate race against time, more than 300,000 Allied soldiers were daringly evacuated across the Channel. This moment of German aggression was used by Winston Churchill as a call to Franklin Roosevelt to enter the war. Now, historian Joshua...

Published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, a riveting narrative of human resilience, told through first-hand experiences of five survivors, reveals the physical, emotional and social challenges of post-atomic life.