Author:Gavin Menzies
On 8 March 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China. The ships, some nearly five hundred feet long, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di's loyal eunuch admirals. Their mission was 'to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas' and unite the world in Confucian harmony.
Their journey would last for over two years and take them around the globe but by the time they returned home, China was beginning its long, self-imposed isolation from the world it had so recently embraced. And so the great ships were left to rot and the records of their journey were destroyed. And with them, the knowledge that the Chinese had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan, reached America seventy years before Columbus, and Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook...
The result of fifteen years research, 1421 is Gavin Menzies' enthralling account of the voyage of the Chinese fleet, the remarkable discoveries he made and the persuasive evidence to support them: ancient maps, precise navigational knowledge, astronomy and the surviving accounts of Chinese explorers and the later European navigators as well as the traces the fleet left behind - from sunken junks to the votive offerings left by the Chinese sailors wherever they landed, giving thanks to Shao Lin, goddess of the sea.
Already hailed as a classic, this is the story of an extraordinary journey of discovery that not only radically alters our understanding of world exploration but also rewrites history itself.
Menzies has come up with something entirely new... it is a startling claim
—— GuardianExhaustively researched... an intriguing and highly persuasive thesis, told with passion and energy
—— Evening StandardPopular history at its best
—— The TimesA book as engrossing as any adventure story
—— Daily Mail'Man's excellent writing breathes new life into a character whose spirit lives on in China and Mongolia today'
—— Historical Novels Review'Man is an excellent guide...well-versed in Mongolian, he has travelled extensively in the country while researching the more mysterious elements Genghis' life, and this experience shines through the book...he writes knowledgeably'
—— Literary ReviewA top biography...This is great, grisly stuff and an education for anyone
—— Evening Standard... This bright, engaging and breezy book ... suits the tenor of our times.
—— The TimesA remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness...an unfolding literary event
—— New York Times Book ReviewThe Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in 'drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust'
—— New York TimesA quiet triumph, moving and simple - impossible to describe accurately, and impossible to achieve in any medium but comics
—— Washington PostAll too infrequently, a book comes along that' s as daring as it is acclaimed. Art Spiegelman's Maus is just such a book
—— EsquireA remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution... at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir, and a comic book. Brilliant, just brilliant
—— Jules FeifferMaus is a masterpiece, and it's in the nature of such things to generate mysteries, and pose more questions than they answer. But if the notion of a canon means anything, Maus is there at the heart of it. Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect
—— Philip PullmanSpiegelman's Maus changed comics forever. Comics now can be about anything
—— Alison BechdelReading [his work] has been an amazing lesson in storytelling
—— Etgar KeretIt can be easy to forget how much of a game-changer Maus was.
—— Washington Post
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