Books like The Rise of Modern China by Immanuel Chung-yueh Hsü

An analytical study of the Great Chinese Famine, exploring its social, economic, and political dimensions during Mao Zedong's rule.

A detailed examination of how American housing patterns, especially the rise of suburbia, have shaped social behavior, economic mobility, and racial segregation across the 20th century.

A comprehensive, multi‑author survey of China’s history, examining culture, economy, society, politics, and foreign influence from pre‑dynastic times to the modern era.

Pankaj Mishra charts a century‑old network of Asian thinkers who crafted a distinct intellectual tradition challenging Western dominance, revealing a nuanced anti‑colonial movement rooted in philosophy rather than violence.

In the tradition of John Hersey's Hiroshima, journalist Jasper Becker's penetrating account of China's four-year famine uncovers the truth behind one of the darkest chapters in history. Hungry Ghosts is the horrific story of the state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder during Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward," an attempt at utopian engineering gone wrong. This is the unforgettable story of the century's greatest human rights disaster, in which more people died than in Stalin's purges and the Holocaust put together. Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immersed in painstaking detective work to examine the unprecedented madness that plagued China between 1958 and 1962. For the first time since it was so ruthlessly and categorically erased from history, Becker unearths what really happened during these years, and how the famine and terror could have been kept a secret for so long.

A comprehensive survey of modern China, covering political, economic, and social transformations from the late Qing period to the early 21st century.