Before our trip to Europe in 2013, I tried to read as much as I could about Europe. Some of the best books that I read included Madeleine Albright’s Prague Winter: A personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937 -1948; Harris and Oppenheimer’s Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport; Jonathan Jordan’s Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and the partnership that drove the Allied Conquest in Europe; Alex Kershaw’s The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of WW II; Kati Marton’s The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World; and Michael Meyer’s The year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
My knowledge of China was even weaker than my knowledge of Europe had been before I started my reading regimen. The following books helped me to understand at least a little bit about modern China and its recent past.
Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
This book explains a lot about the bitter feelings toward Japan that are shared by many Chinese.
Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Three generations of women trace the history of Japan from early 20th century to the death of Mao Zedong.
Henry Kissinger’s On China
What makes this interesting is the fact that Kissinger was an active player in the visit by Richard Nixon that helped open China to the West.
Ezra Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
At 700 pages, I know more than I ever wanted to know about how China transformed itself from a brutal dictatorship into a giant economic power.