New Asian Style

More than ever before, interior design is a global affair. And more than ever, Westerners are eager to try out elements of Asian design. This book is the ultimate resource for professional and amateur designers seeking to recreate the mysterious elegance, balance, and beauty of Asian design. Through the magic of Masano Kawana's beautiful full-color photography, New Asian Style explores more than 30 stunning contemporary houses and homes from Singapore, all of which stand as examples of decorating and style that transcend their Eastern origins. In an effort to help designers pick up Asian ideas for their own settings, Jane Marsden's essays examine what elements make Asian style and how they might be captured in new settings anywhere in the world.

With more than 500 ravishing full-color photographs, Asian Style Hotels brings you to the best hotels in Southeast Asia. Hotels from Bali, Java, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand are showcased in great detail. The super-deluxe establishments included here are all at the cutting-edge of hotel design and management. Each property has been hand-picked according to a set of criteria that includes a strong design aesthetic, architectural integrity, and a sense of individuality a million miles away from the cookie-cutter approach of chain hotels. Asian Style Hotels is the definitive guide to Southeast Asia's finest places to stay. Over half of the hotels have never been featured in guides before--and many are recently opened.

Create fun and easy scrapbooks with an Asian flair! For scrapbookers tired of the same old same old, Scrapbook Asian Style! is chock full of new ideas, art, and inspiration for creating beautiful scrapbook craft. It's perfect for experienced scrapbookers who are looking for something new to try in their layouts and for beginners who love the distinctive look of Asian design—or who simply want to make a splash with something special. With 150 projects from several accomplished scrapbook artists, such as a Buddha Light Switch Cover and Grandma's Origami Brag Book, this inspiring reference provides tons of ideas as well as step-by-step instructions on how to add pizzazz to layouts with Asian colors, motifs, fabrics, papers, text and brush work. Dozens of fun and exciting materials and techniques are used to give scrapbook layouts an Asian feel—including rub-ons, Asian characters, Chinese seals, die cuts, pressed flowers, patterned paper, handmade paper, washi paper, fabric, letter stickers, stamping, embossing, distressing, Chinese calligraphy, paper weaving, faux batiking, journaling, origami, digital effects and more. Scrapbookers of all levels will find ideas to document and celebrate special memories and occasions—including vacation, baby layouts, "all about me" pages, grandparents and grandchildren layouts, family portraits, anniversaries, birthdays, graduations, baby showers and holidays.

Much has been written about the rise of the Asian economies in recent decades, and their coming economic dominance in the next century. The New Asian Emperors shows how and why overseas Chinese companies are achieving dominance in the Asia Pacific. In the wake of the Asian Currency crisis, this book takes a fresh look at the role of the overseas Chinese as they continue to create some of Asia's most wealthy and successful companies. In particular, the authors tackle the principal difference between Western and Eastern business practices. The overseas Chinese, due to their origins and history developed a unique form of management - now they maintain it as their competitive advantage. Although Asian governments are currently floundering, the overseas Chinese networks continue to prosper. The authors explain the following to Eastern and Western managers: the sources and characteristics of overseas Chinese management, how to combat the overseas Chinese, the strengths and exploitable weaknesses of the overseas Chinese, whether overseas Chinese management practices will spread in the same way as Japanese management did, whether Western management technologies will find themselves outclassed. A feature of the book are the exclusive, in-depth interviews with the New Asian Emperors since most of them avoid the press and little is known of them.

“Year Zero is a remarkable book, not because it breaks new ground, but in its combination of magnificence and modesty.” —Wall Street Journal A marvelous global history of the pivotal year 1945 as a new world emerged from the ruins of World War II Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it. In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political “reeducation” was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective. A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma’s own father’s story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war’s end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into “normalcy” stand in many ways for his generation’s experience. A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.