Madame Mao by Ross Terrill is the only English-language biography of Jiang Qing, the last wife of Chairman Mao. First published in 1984, the one…
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Month: April 2025
Caucasus – Part 3
Day 4 tour. Azerbaijan to Georgia. This morning we are crossing the land border to Georgia to visit the Monastery of St. Nino at Bodbe.…
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Caucasus – Part 2
Baku. A petroglyph is a carving or inscription on a rock. One can see many neolithic petroglyphs in Gobustan Open Air museum, about an hour…
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Papacy, Power and Process
Pope Francis passed away on 21 April 2025, aged 88. May he Rest In Peace. He has been in office for 12 years. What was…
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Shanxi – Part 10
Consistent with Prophet Muhammad’s hadith, I toured Shanxi, China, the province with the most historical sites of China. The Northern Wei started here. Their emperors/empresses…
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Easter Sunday – Part 2
I have been to the Holy Land twice, in 2017 and once earlier. The first was magical as I recall we rushed to enter the…
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Easter Sunday – Part 1
Rereading this book I bought on Easter day, 2014 from Kinokuniya KLCC I find I have highlighted in yellow this lesson from the Parable of…
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Caucasus Tour – Part 1
This compact book of 295 pages, Caucasus An Introduction by Thomas de Waal, 2nd ed 2019, is a joy to read. De Waal’s prose is…
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The Gang of Four – Part 1
This book The Cultural Revolution on Trial, published in 2016, is the most recent book on the trial of The Gang of Four. The trial…
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Escape to the East
Here are 2 books on Jewish refugees finding sanctuary in Shanghai during WW 2. Shanghai Sanctuary by Gao Bei [ 2013] narrates that when Europe…
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