americans

When the Shanxi Brave Dragons, one of China's worst professional basketball teams, hired former NBA coach Bob Weiss, the team's owner, Boss Wang, promised that Weiss would be allowed to Americanize his players by teaching them "advanced basketball culture." That promise would be broken from the moment Weiss landed in China. Desperate for his team to play like Americans, Wang--a peasant turned steel tycoon--nevertheless refused to allow his players the freedom and individual expression necessary to truly change their games. Former "New York Times" Beijing bureau chief Jim Yardley tells the story of the resulting culture clash with sensitivity and a keen comic sensibility. Readers meet the Brave Dragons, a cast of colorful, sometimes heartbreaking oddballs from around the world: the ambitious Chinese assistant coach, Liu Tie, who believes that Chinese players are genetically inferior and can improve only through the repetitious drilling once advocated by ancient kung fu masters; the moody and selfish American import, Bonzi Wells, a former NBA star so unnerved by China that initially he locks himself in his apartment; the Taiwanese point guard, Little Sun, who is demonized by his mainland Chinese coaches; and the other Chinese players, whose lives sometimes seem little different from those of factory workers.

American Tim Anderson relates his experiences learning about the social life and customs of Japan while teaching English in Tokyo.

Presents the text and critical analysis of nine short stories of author Henry James representing the major achievements of his career as a fiction writer.

The author presents a travel diary mixed with a few fictional embellishments about he and his son's cultural adventure to Japan to learn manga history and meet manga artists after they became intrigued by Japanese comics.

A compilation of writings, drawings, and poems by Rachel Corrie that provide insights into the thoughts and motivations that led her from her home in Olympia, Washington, to the Middle East where she was killed in 2003 while trying to block the demolition of a Palestinian family's home in the Gaza Strip.

Adam Gopnik describes the experiences he, his wife, and their infant son had while traveling through Paris in the late 1990s.

Selects twenty-five works of American travel writing as the best of the genre from 2009.

The teachers at Goas are not surprised when Mavala Shikongo, a fellow teacher, deserts them, leaving her fellow teachers to wonder what secrets she was hiding, but none of them are prepared when she returns with a new baby and no husband.

Fifteen-year-old Yoshi Kobayashi faces the destruction of everything she knows and a new life living among the enemy, after American bombers attack her city with with napalm, leaving the city in ruins.