I love old bookstores and the wonderful old used books I can find there. I just picked up Tolstoy’s “A Confession and Other Religious Writings.” So far, the reflections of this man on the world he lived in and his…

In reading about the bizarre life of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, I came across the story of how in 1958 he ordered the Chinese people to kill off all the sparrows in the land. Exterminate all the sparrows? Why?…

The communist government in China for the past 30 years has denied that it every happened. There was nothing to see. There was no massacre. Except that there was. On the evening of June 3rd, 1989, and on into the…

The modern police state of the People’s Republic of China began in 1935 when Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai led their rag-tag communist army away from the Nationalists (under the command of Chiang Kai-shek) to the province of Yenan. There…

From 1958 to 1961, Mao Zedong’s economic marvel known as the “Great Leap Forward” resulted in the deaths of some 45 million Chinese–mostly through starvation or being worked to death in his collectivized farms, mines, and factories. After this disaster…

Isn’t it fascinating how so many of the great socialist leaders of world history have never owned a business and made it prosper? They have great ideas on how to redistribute other people’s wealth, but have never actually produced any…

Here are a few more under-reported quoted from the “Great Helmsman” of communist China: “[A good name after death] cannot bring me any joy, because it belongs to the future and not to my own reality.” “People like me are…

I am currently reading the most thorough biography of the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong (old spelling is Mao Tse-tung). The book is “Mao, The Unknown Story” by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Chang actually lived through the Cultural Revolution…

You cannot tour Florence, Italy without hearing the names of the great celebrities of the past. In one church alone La Chiesa della Santa Croce (Holy Cross Church) three famous people are buried there: Michaelangelo, Galileo, and Niccolo’ Macchiavelli. Macchiavelli…