Offers recipes and describes the ingredients and preparation of authentic Vietnamese food, with stories about every dish and tales of unusual ingredients.

The Wild East bridges political economy and anthropology to examine a variety of il/legal economic sectors and businesses such as red sanders, coal, fire, oil, sand, air spectrum, land, water, real estate, procurement and industrial labour. The 11 case studies, based across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, explore how state regulative law is often ignored and/or selectively manipulated. The emerging collective narrative shows the workings of regulated criminal economic systems where criminal formations, politicians, police, judges and bureaucrats are deeply intertwined. By pioneering the field-study of the politicisation of economic crime, and disrupting the wider literature on South Asia’s informal economy, The Wild East aims to influence future research agendas through its case for the study of mafia-enterprises and their engagement with governance in South Asia and outside. Its empirical and theoretical contribution to debates about economic crimes in democratic regimes will be of critical value to researchers in Economics, Anthropology, Sociology, Comparative Politics, Political Science and International Relations, Criminologists and Development Studies, as well as to those inside and outside academia interested in current affairs and the relationship between crime, politics and mafia enterprises.

An exploration of the social, political and environmental changes in the Great Smoky Mountains during the 19th and 20th centuries. Although this national park is often portrayed as a triumph of wilderness preservation, Margaret Lynn Brown concludes that it is actually a recreated wilderness.

In Nazi eyes, the Soviet Union was the "wild east," a savage region ripe for exploitation, its subhuman inhabitants destined for extermination or helotry. An especially brutal dimension of the German army's eastern war was its anti-partisan campaign. This conflict brought death and destruction to thousands of Soviet civilians, and has been held as a prime example of ordinary German soldiers participating in the Nazi regime's annihilation policies. Ben Shepherd enters the heated debate over the wartime behavior of the Wehrmacht in a detailed study of the motivation and conduct of its anti-partisan campaign in the Soviet Union. He investigates how anti-partisan warfare was conducted, not by the generals, but by the far more numerous, average Germans serving as officers in the field. What shaped their behavior was more complex than Nazi ideology alone. The influence of German society, as well as of party and army, together with officers' grueling yet diverse experience of their environment and enemy, made them perceive the anti-partisan war in varied ways. Reactions ranged from extreme brutality to relative restraint; some sought less to terrorize the native population than to try to win it over. The emerging picture does not dilute the suffering the Wehrmacht's eastern war inflicted. It shows, however, that properly judging ordinary Germans' role in that war is more complicated than is indicated by either wholesale condemnation or wholesale exoneration. This valuable study offers a nuanced discussion of the diversity of behaviors within the German army, as well as providing a compelling exploration of the war and counterinsurgency operations on the eastern front.

By Barbara Pollack.

Anyone who wants to do business in China must understand its customs, people, and culture. Just because its economy is exploding doesnt mean that anyone can go there and make a fortune. In fact, business practices are still deeply rooted in ancient cultural traditions. A Western businessperson who wants to succeed must understand all the ruleseven the ones that arent written down. Join Alan Refkin, an American financier, as he takes a Chinese company through a painstaking process so it can be publicly listed on the U.S. capital markets. He learns how to do business in China the hard way, and now he shares his secrets so capitalists can navigate its contemporary terrain. You will learn why, in China, its all about the money; how to assemble deals in China; how to close the deal when working with the Chinese; and much more! The names of the firms and individuals have been changed, but the story and lessons in this business guidebook are completely true. Join an American businessman as he seeks to make his fortune in The Wild, Wild East.

For most of us, the name Mongolia conjures up exotic images of wild horsemen, endless grasslands, and nomads - a timeless and mysterious land that is also, in many ways, one that time forgot. Under Genghis Khan, the Mongols' empire stretched across Asia and into the heart of Europe. But over the centuries Mongolia disappeared from the world's consciousness, overshadowed and dominated by its huge neighbours - first China, which ruled Mongolia for centuries, then Russia, which transformed the feudal nation into the world's second communist state. Jill Lawless arrived in Mongolia in the late 1990s to find a country waking from centuries of isolation, at once rediscovering its heritage as a nomadic and Buddhist society and simultaneously discovering the western world. The result is a land of fascinating, bewildering contrasts: a vast country where nomadic herders graze their sheep and yaks on the steppe, it also has one of the world's highest literacy levels and a burgeoning high - tech scene. While trendy teenagers rollerblade amid the Soviet apartment blocks of Ulaanbaatar and dance to the latest pop music in nightclubs, and the rich drive Mercedes and surf the Internet, more than half the population still lives in felt tents, scratching out a living in one of the world's harshest landscapes. Mongolia, it can be argued, is the archetypal 21st - century nation, a country waking from a tumultuous 20th century in which it was wrenched from feudalism to communism to capitalism, searching for its place in the new millennium. This is a funny and revealing portrait of a beautiful, troubled country whose fate holds lessons for all of us.