Showing results by narrator "Daniel York" in All Categories

The leading lights of the tech revolution – Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk – have been hailed as savants and saviours of the modern age. And yet they are at the forefront of wealth inequality not seen since the heyday of the robber barons in the late 19th century, part of the slide to the First World War. Today, rampant inequality is inciting social unrest and undermining faith in the institutions of the democratic state. Citizens have been left at the mercy of unfettered capitalism – mere data subjects, endlessly surveilled, marshalled and increasingly angry and polarised.

One small island, six troubled lives and the storm of the century is on its way. In one of the world's most vibrant international cities, present day Hong Kong, the lives of six people become irreversibly intertwined. The past is catching up with those running from it, while the futures of others hangs dangerously in the balance. But who knows the most? And what will they do to get it?

Dee has come to London to investigate the murder of a man he’d known during World War I when serving with the Chinese Labour Corps. No sooner has Dee interviewed the grieving widow than another dead body turns up. Then another. All stabbed to death with a butterfly sword. Will Dee and Lao be able to connect the threads of the murders—or are they next in line as victims?

A woman fleeing her previous existence meets a fellow Singaporean on an overnight train in Norway. A foreign worker is decapitated in an HDB building site accident. A Singaporean wife must negotiate Beijing as her British husband awaits a heart transplant. And in different corners of the world, Singaporeans and exiles mark National Day in their own ways.

Charles Goh has always played by the rules. It’s how he survived his difficult childhood as the swotty foreigner at a posh English boarding school—and now, his high-pressure job at one of the biggest corporate law firms in London. His job is his life and he's happy that way … until she shows up.

Three men walk into a hawker centre and ordered the same combination of dishes: beef rendang and long beans, all atop a mountain of white rice drizzled with lontong gravy from the nasi padang stall. They discovered that they were charged different prices for their plate of rice, despite ordering the exact same thing, from the exact same stall, and the exact same makcik.

Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the West in less than fifteen years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known. Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

Through decades of direct experience of the People’s Republic combined with extraordinary access to hundreds of hitherto unseen documents in communist party archives, the author of The People’s Trilogy offers a riveting account of China’s rise from the disaster of the Cultural Revolution. He takes us inside the country's unprecedented four-decade economic transformation--from rural villages to industrial metropoles and elite party conclaves--that vaulted the nation from 126t ­largest economy in the world to second ­largest.

After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.