The Wind From The East

Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, and Jean-Luc Godard. During the 1960s, a who’s who of French thinkers, writers, and artists, spurred by China’s Cultural Revolution, were seized with a fascination for Maoism. Combining a merciless exposé of left-wing political folly and cross-cultural misunderstanding with a spirited defense of the 1960s, The Wind from the East tells the colorful story of this legendary period in France. Richard Wolin shows how French students and intellectuals, inspired by their perceptions of the Cultural Revolution, and motivated by utopian hopes, incited grassroots social movements and reinvigorated French civic and cultural life. Wolin’s riveting narrative reveals that Maoism’s allure among France’s best and brightest actually had little to do with a real understanding of Chinese politics. Instead, it paradoxically served as a vehicle for an emancipatory transformation of French society. Recounting the cultural and political odyssey of French students and intellectuals in the 1960s, The Wind from the East illustrates how the Maoist phenomenon unexpectedly sparked a democratic political sea change in France.

Pearl Buck tells the heart-seaching and tender story of a young Chinese girl's troubled acceptance of an alien way of life, with all its sorrows and rewards.

When The East Wind Blows is a fictional account of WWII. This story takes over where the history books stop -- with the human side of the civilian struggle. Elisabeth, a German mother of four young children and her maid, Helga, flee the incoming Russian front. As they move toward the west, they find themselves in the center of the most devastating carpet bombings of the war. The women and children, along with an escaped Jew from a concentration camp, must overcome death, destruction, and hunger during the final days of the collapse of the Nazi Regime.

East Wind offers the first complete, archive-based account of the relationship between China and the British Left, from the rise of modern Chinese nationalism to the death of Mao Tse tung. Beginning with the "Hands Off China" movement of the mid-1920s, Tom Buchanan charts the mobilisation of British opinion in defence of China against Japanese aggression, 1931-1945, and the role of the British left in relations with the People's Republic of China after 1949. He shows how this relationship was placed under stress by the growing unpredictability of Communist China, above all by the Sino-Soviet dispute and the Cultural Revolution, which meant that by the 1960s China was actively supported only by a dwindling group of enthusiasts. The impact of the suppression of the student protests in Tiananmen Square (June 1989) is addressed as an epilogue. East Wind argues that the significance of the left's relationship with China has been unjustly overlooked. There were many occasions, such as the mid-1920s, the late 1930s and the early 1950s, when China demanded the full attention of the British left. It also argues that there is nothing new in the current fascination with China's emergence as an economic power. Throughout these decades the British left was aware of the immense, unrealised potential of the Chinese economy, and of how China's economic growth could transform the world. In addition to analysing the role of the political parties and pressure groups of the left, Buchanan sheds new light on the activities of many well-known figures in support of China, including intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell, R H Tawney and Joseph Needham. Many other interesting stories emerge, concerning less well-known figures, which show the complexity of personal links between Britain and China during the twentieth century.

Providing a comprehensive treatment of a full range of migrant destinies in East Asia by scholars from both Asia and North America, this volume captures the way migrants are changing the face of Asia, especially in cities, such as Beijing, Hong Kong, Hamamatsu, Osaka, Tokyo, and Singapore. It investigates how the crossing of geographical boundaries should also be recognized as a crossing of cultural and social categories that reveals the extraordinary variation in the migrants' origins and trajectories. These migrants span the spectrum: from Korean bar hostesses in Osaka to African entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, from Vietnamese women seeking husbands across the Chinese border to Pakistani Muslim men marrying women in Japan, from short-term business travelers in China to long-term tourists from Japan who ultimately decide to retire overseas. Illuminating the ways in which an Asian-based analysis of migration can yield new data on global migration patterns, the contributors provide important new theoretical insights for a broader understanding of global migration, and innovative methodological approaches to the spatial and temporal complexity of human migration.

Internationally celebrated author Almudena Grandes has produced her finest work yet with The Wind from the East, a blend of two narratives set alternately in Madrid and an Andalusian town by the sea. Sara Gómes Morales,given up at birth to be raised by her wealthy godmother,is betrayed on her sixteenth birthday when she is forced to leave her godmother’s home and return to live in poverty with her estranged parents. Tortured by resentment and the loneliness of belonging to neither place,she finds solace as an adult only when she moves to the coastal town. Parallel to Sara’s story is the story of Juan and Damian Olmedo, brothers in love with the same woman. One night an argument incited by jealousy leads Damian to stumble down a flight ofstairs and fall to his death. Suspected ofmurdering his younger brother, Juan flees to the same village that served as Sara’s escape. Deftly engaging, The Wind from the Eastis an epic tale of love and redemption. Almudena Grandes' writing has been compared to the work of classic and contemporary voices such as the Brontë sisters and Isabel Allende.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Gutsy Girl comes this provocative, compelling novel of irrevocable consequences for people thrust unwittingly into a devastating war of nations and American identity—based on a little-known true event. December 1941. The inhabitants of Niihau lead a simple life. Mostly Hawaiian natives, they work the ranch of Niihau's eccentric haole owner, who keeps his island totally isolated from the outside world, devoid of cars, phones, and electricity. But then a plane crash-lands there, and although the villagers rescue the pilot, they have no idea that he has just attacked Pearl Harbor. War has now come to Eden, slowly undoing its tranquillity, widening the cracks in the already troubled marriage of Irene and Yoshio Harada, the island's only Japanese-American couple. It will test everyone's loyalties and all they believe in . . . as Paradise, once within reach, slowly falls victim to its own isolated innocence.