The best books about opium

China’s current leadership lays claim to a 5,000-year-old civilization, but “China” as a unified country and people, Bill Hayton argues, was created far more recently by a small group of intellectuals.

In this compelling account, Hayton shows how China’s present-day geopolitical problems—the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea—were born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers and revolutionaries adopted foreign ideas to “invent’ a new vision of China. By asserting a particular, politicized version of the past the government bolstered its claim to a vast territory stretching from the Pacific to Central Asia. Ranging across history, nationhood, language, and territory, Hayton shows how the Republic’s reworking of its past not only helped it to justify its right to rule a century ago—but continues to motivate and direct policy today.

Lucy Easton, an aspiring novelist, will do anything to boost her chances at publication—including betraying her family. But when she crosses paths with the charismatic Alexander Melling, her aspiration for success pales in comparison to the attraction she feels towards him.

Alexander is a young lawyer from a powerful family, striving to free himself from his father’s shadow. The more time he spends with Lucy, the more desperate he becomes to shed the secrets of his past—a past that can destroy both himself and the woman he’s falling in love with. From gossip magazines to gleaming Mardi Gras balls, Lucy and Alex navigate the Edwardian era in the Deep South with both passion and guilt.

Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes—in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies—the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in-depth historical look at how men and women—through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa—transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society.

An expansive and original global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this fluid and powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world.

The market for commercial beauty products bloomed in Third Republic France, with a proliferation of goods promising to erase female imperfections and perpetuate an aesthetic of femininity that conveyed health and respectability. While the industry’s meteoric growth helped to codify conventional standards of womanhood, The Force of Beauty shows how it also targeted women as consumers in major markets and created new avenues by which they could express their identities.

This book explores how French women navigated changing views of femininity. Seamlessly integrating gender studies with business history, aesthetics, and the history of medicine, The Force of Beauty offers a textured and complex study of the relationship between the politics of womanhood and the politics of beauty.

Oakwood Sanatorium blurs the lines of psychosis and reality—science and spirituality when Dr. Shepard Blanchard finds himself investigating the strange events surrounding an unconscious man abandoned in the hospital’s lobby. 

This psychological thriller’s unique postmodern collage-style creates a foreboding atmosphere as the patients sharing the man’s assigned ward are evaluated. The psychological horror and suspense enhanced with the admission forms, patients’ stories, and doctor’s notes. From beginning to end, your sanity is on the edge of oblivion, and your senses are pricked and prodded with science fiction, alternate realities, and unexpected outcomes. The many twists and turns leave you unnerved and wondering what comes next. In the end, Blanchard questions his decisions, and ultimately, he finds himself secluded in his own dark reality.

I investigate what drew formerly leftist Japanese intellectuals to Manchukuo and led them to produce literature, art, and photography there that served as "unofficial" propaganda in a state-organized around rightwing socialist political ideals.   When I began this project, I was fascinated by the idea of how someone could so readily switch their political orientation in a different context or setting.  What I discovered is that, instead of a complete breakage with earlier political ideologies, these intellectuals in the Manchukuo context still perceived a certain continuity with what they had believed in the past.  Their work both celebrating and criticizing reflections of a fascist state is absolutely fascinating!

This is the book I needed as a child, as a young woman healing from severe trauma, and as deeply emotive person in an emotionally baffled culture. Our learned distrust and even hatred of emotions creates ignorance and suffering that is entirely unnecessary, and in this book, I dive into the gorgeous and brilliant waters of the emotions in order to retrieve what has been taken from us. 

Strangely, this is the first book ever to focus on all seventeen emotions in terms of how they work, why they arise, and how you can learn to work with, befriend, and embrace all of them. It’s an owner’s manual for human social life and interior life, and it’s a love letter to the emotions. And hell yeah, it’s badass.

In the flashes that blur the line between fantasy and reality, each steamy story in Quiver captures the spontaneous erotic experiences of a group of middle-class acquaintances—a dentist and his wife; an accountant and a beautician—as they audaciously unleash their deepest desires. Each story is interconnected to each other and whilst alternating between male and female perspectives, there are no holds barred in these interactions: heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, exhibitionistic, and sadomasochistic relationships – all unabashedly on display in this provocative collection. 

A rollicking tale of blurred lines, flowing booze, played-out miners, and upstairs girls.

Annie Ryan is running a second-rate brothel in 1890s Denver with an eye toward expansion. By chance, she encounters Lydia Chambers, a society woman suffering from a laudanum habit and a bad marriage, who owns a property on the infamous Market Street. Annie’s fortunes at the brothel turn on her niece Pearl, a pretty young woman swept up in Denver’s underworld of jealousy, booze, and vice – until murder stalks the good-time girls and puts everyone’s future in doubt. Market Street Madam delivers a compelling look at the intrigues of the Wild West, where women were enterprising and justice could be had…for a price.

The war in Afghanistan has consumed vast amounts of blood and treasure, causing the Western powers to seek an exit without achieving victory. Seemingly never-ending, the conflict has become synonymous with a number of issues ― global jihad, rampant tribalism, and the narcotics trade ― but even though they are cited as the causes of the conflict, they are in fact symptoms.

Rather than beginning after 9/11 or with the Soviet “invasion” in 1979, the current conflict in Afghanistan began with the social reforms imposed by Amanullah Amir in 1919. Western powers have failed to recognize that legitimate grievances are driving the local population to turn to insurgency in Afghanistan. The issues they are willing to fight for have deep roots, forming a hundred-year-long social conflict over questions of secularism, modernity, and centralized power. The first step toward achieving a “solution” to the Afghanistan “problem” is to have a clear-eyed view of what is really driving it.