For the record, and other poems of Hong Kong

Moving house and other poems from Hong Kong: with an essay on new Hong Kong English language poetry

The development of education in Hong Kong 1841-1897: as revealed by the early education reports of the Hong Kong government 1848-1896

A magistrate's court in 19th century Hong Kong: court in time

About the speaker: Gillian Bickley has lived mainly in Hong Kong since 1970. As Gillian Workman, she was a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Hong Kong in the early seventies. She is an associate professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and has previously also been a faculty member at the University of Lagos, Nigeria and the University of Auckland, New Zealand. For a number of years, she was the HKEA subject officer responsible for the HKCEE and HKAL English Literature examinations and the Use of English (Form Seven) examination.

She is the author of many articles, book chapters and books, many related to Hong Kong, and has edited three books on Nineteenth Century Hong Kong. Often with her husband, Verner Bickley, she speaks to local groups on topics arising from their research interest in nineteenth-century Hong Kong educational and social history.

New passages: mapping your life across time / Gail Sheehy.

Repacking your bags: lighten your load for the rest of your life / Richard J. Leider and David A. Shapiro.

Are you ready to succeed? Unconventional Strategies to Achieving Personal Mastery in Business and Life/ Srikumar S. Rao.

Creating the good life: Applying Aristotle's Wisdom to Find Meaning and Happiness / James O Toole.

About the speaker: Chung Po-yang (Alias Po Chung) was born in Macao and raised in Hong Kong and received his university education in the United States. In 1972, he co-founded DHL in Asia.

Po and his wife Helen love books. They have sponsored the Creativity and Innovation Resource Centre in the City Hall Library. They have also created an archive of over 25,000 volumes of Chinese County Almanacs to Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Po's latest project is to transform the understanding and teaching of owner/operator entrepreneurship. He accomplished this by assisting the Hong Kong University set up a Centre for Asian Entrepreneurship & Business Values in January 2006.

Po is now on his eighth career: He has been a corporate executive, a world-class entrepreneur, a community service leader, a social entrepreneur, a philanthropist, a professional painter, and now author and professor.

In this book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt. The World Is Flat is the timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists.

In Uneasy Partners, Leo Goodstadt draws on his vast experience of government and business in Hong Kong to put forward a provocative and challenging account, part praise, part indictment, of how government and business in Hong Kong transformed a poor refugee community into one of the world's great cities and created a hugely successful economy.

The core of the book is a penetrating appraisal of the often paradoxical partnership between government and business and its considerable political and social costs. The principal actors in the story are the colonial rulers who were prepared to sacrifice Britain's diplomatic interests and the interests of British companies in order to ensure Hong Kong癒礎s survival, and their chosen allies from the Chinese business elite.

British officials believed that economic growth and the survival of colonial rule depended on collaboration with Chinese capitalism and cooperation with China's communist rulers. The book identifies how the community set limits to these relationships, preventing the blatant sell-out of the public's wellbeing to British, Mainland or local business interests. It reviews how colonial officials defied London's proposals for political and social reform, fought for economic and financial autonomy and refused to protect the pound sterling. It identifies Beijing's financial gains from the colonial policies that provided China with a secure international business base throughout the Cold War. Other chapters assess the belated drive against wholesale corruption, the decline of British commercial conglomerates, the ascendancy of HSBC, and the contribution of businessmen from Shanghai.

The story goes on beyond the British departure and explains how the Chinese Government's decision to retain the political system of the colonial era handicapped the new leadership in responding to the changing political and social expectations of the community.

One Couple Two Cultures highlights information provided by eighty-one Western-Chinese couples whose views on codes of conduct and lifestyles vary considerably. Whilst some believe that a successful marriage can depend as much on smelly gorgonzola cheese or fermented Shanghainese bean curd as on the actual compatibility of the spouses themselves, others believe a Western-Chinese marriage is no different, say, to a blond marrying a redhead. Still others hold that two sometimes antagonistic cultures and spice and an added dimension to marriage.

Based on a decade of research and on interviews with many of Mao's close circle in China who have never talked before--and with virtually everyone outside China who had significant dealings with him--this is the most authoritative life of Mao ever written. It is full of startling revelations, exploding the myth of the Long March, and showing a completely unknown Mao: he was not driven by idealism or ideology; his intimate and intricate relationship with Stalin went back to the 1920s, ultimately bringing him to power; he welcomed Japanese occupation of much of China; and he schemed, poisoned and blackmailed to get his way. After Mao conquered China in 1949, his secret goal was to dominate the world. In chasing this dream he caused the deaths of 38 million people in the greatest famine in history. In all, well over 70 million Chinese perished under Mao's rule--in peacetime.

Combining meticulous research with the story-telling style of Wild Swans, this biography offers a harrowing portrait of Mao's ruthless accumulation of power through the exercise of terror: his first victims were the peasants, then the intellectuals and, finally, the inner circle of his own advisors. The reader enters the shadowy chambers of Mao's court and eavesdrops on the drama in its hidden recesses. Mao's character and the enormity of his behavior toward his wives, mistresses and children are unveiled for the first time.

This is an entirely fresh look at Mao in both content and approach. It will astonish historians and the general reader alike.

(FROM THE PUBLISHER)

City Stage is an anthology of recent Hong Kong English-language drama written for Hong Kong performers and audiences. All the plays were written in the last ten years and so capture and reflect the fast-developing multiculturalism of the Hong Kong scene -- a somewhat paradoxical phenomenon in view of the 1997 return to China Mainland sovereignty.

The richness and diversity of the subject-matter, the wide range of theatre styles from the naturalistic to the highly stylized and quite simply the engaging quality of the dramatic writing, all make this anthology both an essential adjunct to the 2001 prose fiction and poetry collection City Voices and at the same time a ground-breaking, independent record of an incredibly fertile period in Hong Kong's recent creative life history.

Thematically speaking, whilst all plays have their unique voice and subject-matter, it is accurate to say that the quest for personal and communal identity is a theme that goes to the heart of all present selections. The anthology is important in that it epitomizes the increasing interconnectedness of previously segregated facets of Hong Kong culture, indicating the very welcome tendency towards more open dialogue between Chinese and non-Chinese practitioners and audiences.