by Jonathan D. Spence
Recommended by Edward Norton
Check price on AmazonProof-backed recommendation
Amazon availability
Recommended by 2 sources and appears in Most Recommended Books, History, and Nonfiction.
Drawing on local Chinese histories, the memoirs of scholars, and other contemporary writings, Chinese historian Jonathan Spence reconstructs an extraordinary tale of rural tragedy in a remote corner of Shantung province in 17thcentury China. Life in the county of T'anch'eng emerges as an endless cycle of floods, plagues, crop failures, banditry, ...
Check formats, pricing, and current availability directly.
Why recommended
Recommended by 2 sources and appears in Most Recommended Books, History, and Nonfiction.
People and public figures who have recommended this book.
Recommendation proof is sourced from public posts, interviews, reading lists, and cited references.
Check formats, pricing, and availability options directly on Amazon.
Consider Accidental Presidents by Jared Cohen. Recommended by 10 sources.
“Accidental Presidents offers eight narrative portraits of men who succeeded to the U.S. presidency without election, using anecdote-rich scenes and readable context to show how personality and circumstance interact with office power. It’s strongest as a set of self-contained stories that make succession stakes concrete for non-specialist readers; it does not prioritize dense archival argument or exhaustive methodology, so expect some interpretive generalizations and repeated themes across cases. Use it for fast historical orientation rather than scholarly deep-dives.”
Each recommendation is collected from a public source — interviews, articles, or curated lists — and linked to its original URL. Books with many verifiable recommendations from respected people rank higher.
