Bücher von Paul French

"New York Times bestselling author Paul French examines a controversial and revealing period in the early life of the legendary Wallis, Duchess of Windsor-her one year in China. Before she was the Duchess of Windsor, Bessie Wallis Warfield was Mrs. Wallis Spencer, wife of Earl "Win" Spencer, a US Navy aviator. From humble beginnings in Baltimore, she rose to marry a man who gave up his throne for her. But what made Wallis Spencer, Navy Wife, the woman who could become the Duchess of Windsor? The answers lie in her one-year sojourn in China. In her memoirs, Wallis described her time in China as her "Lotus Year," referring to Homer's Lotus Eaters, a group living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness, never to return home. Though faced with challenges, Wallis came to appreciate traditional Chinese aesthetics. China molded her in terms of her style and provided her with friendships that lasted a lifetime. But that "Lotus Year" would also later be used to damn her in the eyes of the British Establishment. The British government's supposed "China Dossier" of Wallis's rumored amorous and immoral activities in the Far East was a damning concoction, portraying her as sordid, debauched, influenced by foreign agents, and unfit to marry a king. Instead, French, an award-winning China historian, reveals Wallis Warfield Spencer as a woman of tremendous courage who may have acted as a courier for the US government, undertaking dangerous undercover diplomatic missions in a China torn by civil war. Her Lotus Year is an untold story in the colorful life of a woman too often maligned by history"--

China's economy has boomed, but a potentially disastrous side effect - along with pollution and a growing income gap between urban and rural regions - is the effects obesity will have on the country's fragile healthcare system. Today's overweight in China can look to a mixed future of bright economic hopes for their country, and poor and deteriorating health for themselves. From a situation 20 years ago when diets were limited by food availability, and famine was still a recent memory, China's urban centres have seen alarmingly rising rates of obesity. Throughout the country an estimated 200 million people out of a total population of around 1.3 billion were overweight (over 15%). Why is this issue so important? Taking into account that the recent period of stable world economic growth has in large part been driven by the availability of cheap labour in China, which produces much of the goods that keep the retail tills ringing elsewhere in the world, the issue of China's rising obesity is an issue of potentially global economic significance. Consider a scenario just a few years down the line, where there are so many overweight urban Chinese, suffering from obesity-related illness, that the government, in order to pay for increased healthcare treatments, has to raise the levels of income and other tax to pay for this huge and continual expense.For more information please see the book website: http://fatchina.anthempressblog.com