Featured Article
The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds: A Tale of Espionage, the Silk Road & Rise of Modern China
On July 6, 1906, Baron Gustaf Mannerheim boarded the midnight train from St. Petersburg, charged by Tsar Nicholas II to secretly collect intelligence on the Qing Dynasty’s sweeping reforms that were radically transforming China. The last Tsarist agent in the so-called Great Game, Mannerheim chronicled almost every facet of China’s modernization, from reform of education, foreign investment and industry to the military, Muslim borderlands and Tibet’s struggle for independence.
On July 6, 2006, writer Eric Enno Tamm boarded that same train, intent on following in Mannerheim’s footsteps. Initially banned from China, Tamm devises a cover and retraces Mannerheim’s route across the Silk Road, discovering both eerie similarities and seismic differences between the Middle Kingdoms of today and a century ago. Trekking overland 17,000 kilometres to Beijing, he runs a gauntlet of political and geographic extremes including some of the world’s hottest deserts and cruellest dictatorships.
Along the way, Tamm offers piercing insights into China’s past that raise troubling questions about its future.
Visit website Horsethatleaps.com
EVENTS
GritLit - Hamilton Literary Festival Lit Hits the Road (Travel Writing Panel) Sat., March 31st, 2012, at 3 pm at the Workers' Arts and Heritage Centre, 51 Stuart St., Hamilton, featuring Will Ferguson, Eric Enno Tamm, Merilyn Simonds & Wayne Grady
Latest Articles
- 100 Infographic Tools and Resources
- The following list of links comes from a blog post by Chris McConnell, the Founder and Editor of DailyTekk. This is the most comprehensive list of infographic and data visualization resources that I have found online. McConnell has also categorized the 100 resources under five headings and provided a short description of the resource. The [...] Read more – ‘100 Infographic Tools and Resources’.
- Collapsing, Fast and Slow
- A lightning strike in a mature pine forest sparks a wildfire of cataclysmic proportions. A young Tunisian street merchant, disaffected by corrupt, arbitrary authorities, sets himself afire which provokes mass protests culminating in the Arab Spring. A New York investment bank overextends itself on toxic subprime mortgages, bringing about bankruptcy and setting off a panic [...] Read more – ‘Collapsing, Fast and Slow’.
- Winner of the 2011 Ottawa Book Award for Nonfiction
- At the National Library and Archives, Mayor Jim Watson announced that I won the 2011 Ottawa Book Award for Non-fiction, beating out literary and journalistic heavyweights Charlotte Gray, Tim Cook, Roy McGregor and Martin Lawrence. Read more – ‘Winner of the 2011 Ottawa Book Award for Nonfiction’.