Books like Dangerous Pleasures by Gail Hershatter

Insightful memoir by former personal physician to Mao Zedong, detailing the Chinese leader’s daily life, political decisions, and personal quirks from 1954 to 1976.

Nien Cheng, a Shanghai expatriate educated in London and former Shell employee, endures six years of solitary confinement during the Cultural Revolution, documenting her heroic resistance and quest for justice after release.

In the backdrop of Mao's Cultural Revolution, two boys discover a stash of 19th‑century Western novels, reshaping their worldviews and opening a bridge between East and West.

Women and Economics is Gilman's most original and famous work of nonfiction. In it she examines the origins of women's subordination and its function in society. Woman, she argues, makes a living by marriage - not by the work she does - and thus man becomes her economic environment. As a consequence, her "female" attributes dominate her "human" qualities because they determine her survival. Gilman's thesis challenges both biological and theological arguments about women's innate passivity and defies the virtual exclusion of women in classical sociological theory. If women are to fully engage in domestic and public life, Gilman contends that their emancipation requires both economic participation and adequate child care. Gilman's argument in this classic work resonates today, as women continue their struggle to find a meaningful independent identity and to balance work and family. Here reprinted with a new introduction, Women and Economics belongs on the same shelf as works by Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, and other pioneering feminists.