Barbara W. Tuchman won her second Pulitzer Prize for this nonfiction masterpiece—an authoritative work of history that recounts the birth of modern China through the eyes of one extraordinary American. General Joseph W. Stilwell was a man who loved China deeply and knew its people as few Americans ever have. Barbara W. Tuchman’s groundbreaking narrative follows Stilwell from the time he arrived in China during the Revolution of 1911, through his tours of duty in Peking and Tientsin in the 1920s and ’30s, to his return as theater commander in World War II, when the Nationalist government faced attack from both Japanese invaders and Communist insurgents. Peopled by warlords, ambassadors, and missionaries, this classic biography of the cantankerous but level-headed “Vinegar Joe” sparkles with Tuchman’s genius for animating the people who shaped history. Praise for Stilwell and the American Experience in China “Tuchman’s best book . . . so large in scope, so crammed with information, so clear in exposition, so assured in tone that one is tempted to say it is not a book but an education.”—The New Yorker “The most interesting and informative book on U.S.–China relations . . . a brilliant, lucid and authentic account.”—The Nation “A fantastic and complex story finely told.”—The New York Times Book Review

Examines the foreign policy of America in China between 1911-1945.

Barbara W. Tuchman won her second Pulitzer Prize for this nonfiction masterpiece—an authoritative work of history that recounts the birth of modern China through the eyes of one extraordinary American. General Joseph W. Stilwell was a man who loved China deeply and knew its people as few Americans ever have. Barbara W. Tuchman’s groundbreaking narrative follows Stilwell from the time he arrived in China during the Revolution of 1911, through his tours of duty in Peking and Tientsin in the 1920s and ’30s, to his return as theater commander in World War II, when the Nationalist government faced attack from both Japanese invaders and Communist insurgents. Peopled by warlords, ambassadors, and missionaries, this classic biography of the cantankerous but level-headed “Vinegar Joe” sparkles with Tuchman’s genius for animating the people who shaped history. Praise for Stilwell and the American Experience in China “Tuchman’s best book . . . so large in scope, so crammed with information, so clear in exposition, so assured in tone that one is tempted to say it is not a book but an education.”—The New Yorker “The most interesting and informative book on U.S.–China relations . . . a brilliant, lucid and authentic account.”—The Nation “A fantastic and complex story finely told.”—The New York Times Book Review

A journalistic tour de force, this wide-ranging collection by the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography Stilwell and the American Experience in China is a classic in its own right. During the summer of 1972—a few short months after Nixon’s legendary visit to China—master historian Barbara W. Tuchman made her own trip to that country, spending six weeks in eleven cities and a variety of rural settlements. The resulting reportage was one of the first evenhanded portrayals of Chinese culture that Americans had ever read. Tuchman’s observations capture the people as they lived, from workers in the city and provincial party bosses to farmers, scientists, and educators. She demonstrates the breadth and scope of her expertise in discussing the alleviation of famine, misery, and exploitation; the distortion of cultural and historical inheritances into ubiquitous slogans; news media, schools, housing, and transportation; and Chairman Mao’s techniques for reasserting the Revolution. This edition also includes Tuchman’s “fascinating” (The New York Review of Books) essay, “If Mao Had Come to Washington in 1945”—a tantalizing piece of speculation on a proposed meeting between Mao and Roosevelt that would have changed the course of postwar history. “Shrewdly observed . . . Tuchman enters another plea for coolness, intelligence and rationality in American Asian policies. One can hardly disagree.”—The New York Times Book Review

A history of the Chinese experience in WWII, named a Book of the Year by both the Economist and the Financial Times: “Superb” (The New York Times Book Review). In 1937, two years before Hitler invaded Poland, Chinese troops clashed with Japanese occupiers in the first battle of World War II. Joining with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, China became the fourth great ally in a devastating struggle for its very survival. In this book, prize-winning historian Rana Mitter unfurls China’s drama of invasion, resistance, slaughter, and political intrigue as never before. Based on groundbreaking research, this gripping narrative focuses on a handful of unforgettable characters, including Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, and Chiang’s American chief of staff, “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell—and also recounts the sacrifice and resilience of everyday Chinese people through the horrors of bombings, famines, and the infamous Rape of Nanking. More than any other twentieth-century event, World War II was crucial in shaping China’s worldview, making Forgotten Ally both a definitive work of history and an indispensable guide to today’s China and its relationship with the West.

His American men worshipped him. The Chinese armies he trained and led would have gone through hell for him. But the politicians, both in Chunk-King and Washington, hated his guts. And after two and a half years of bitter struggle in the China-Burma-India theater during the dog days of World War II, General Joseph W. Stilwell was abruptly relived of his command and brought back to the U.S. in an "atmosphere of crime."From the time he flew to the Far East to assume command of the handful of American forces in the C.B.I. theater until his recall in 1944, General Stilwell was engaged in one of the most complex, difficult, and confidential operations in American military history The Stilwell Papers-brilliantly edited and arranged by Theodore H. White, who knew the General in the C.B.I. theater-record Stilwell's on-the-spot account of the people and events of the moment with the salty directness of a man obligated to please no one but himself.But this book is not only an account of the various glories and frustrations of war; it is also the autobiography of one of America's greatest World War II commanders. General Stilwell was a strong, courageous man, deeply devoted to his country and charged with crucial responsibilities; and The Stilwell Papers is the deeply moving and striking self-portrait of that man and his struggle.

The classic account of the lead-up to World War I, told with “a rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish” (The New York Times)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August During the fateful quarter century leading up to World War I, the climax of a century of rapid, unprecedented change, a privileged few enjoyed Olympian luxury as the underclass was “heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate.” In The Proud Tower, Barbara W. Tuchman brings the era to vivid life: the decline of the Edwardian aristocracy; the Anarchists of Europe and America; Germany and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet and Stravinsky’s music; the Dreyfus Affair; the Peace Conferences in The Hague; and the enthusiasm and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized by the assassination of Jean Jaurès on the night the Great War began and an epoch came to a close. The Proud Tower, The Guns of August, and The Zimmermann Telegram comprise Barbara W. Tuchman’s classic histories of the First World War era.