Booklists: suggested reading

 

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Opium & Opium Wars Booklist

 

Fiction and Nonfiction

 

Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.

Links: The Opium Wars | Info Please Citation

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Fiction

• Red Barbarian
  Author: Gaan, Margaret
  Publisher: Dodd Mead $ 16.95 ISBN: 0396082963 Date: 1984
  Updated 10.24.05
• Whie Poppy
  Author: Gaan, Margaret
  Publisher: Dodd Mead $ 16.95 ISBN: 0396086683 Date: 1985
  Updated 10.24.05
• Blue Mountain
  Author: Gaan, Margaret
  Publisher: Dodd Mead $ 17.95 ISBN: 0396089046 Date: 1997
  Updated 10.24.05

For Youth

• Spring Pearl: The Last Flower
  Author: Yep, Laurence
  Publisher: Pleasant $ 12.95 ISBN: 1584855959 Date: 2002
  Taking readers to long-ago lands around the globe, this series, written by acclaimed authors, features strong 12-year-old heroines who are discovering who they are. After the deaths of her parents, Spring Pearl is taken in by her father's wealthy benefactor. Unlike most Cantonese girls, Spring Pearl knows how to read and write, but she must learn to survive in Master Sung's hostile household.
  Grades: 4-7 Category: Fiction | Historical

Nonfiction

• Opium: A History
  Author: Booth, Martin
  Publisher: St Martins $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312186436 Date: 1998
  PW
  This definitive history of one of the most notorious drugs of all time traces opium's astounding impact on world culture--from its religious use by prehistoric peoples to its influence on the imaginations of the Romantic writers; from the earliest medical science to the Sino-British opium wars.
  Updated 10.24.05
• In the Arms of Morpheus: The Tragic History of Laudanum, Morphine and Patent Medicines
  Author: Hodgson, Barbara
  Publisher: Firefly $ 24.95 ISBN: 155297538x Date: 2001
  LJ
  An illustrated social history of drug use - opium and its derivatives - in the 19th century. The various drugs and the quackery that surrounded them was omnipresent and had a devestating influence.
  Updated 10.24.05
• The Voyage of the 'Frolic': New England Merchants and the Opium Trade
  Author: Layton, Thomas N.
  Publisher: Stanford Univ $ 50 ISBN: 0804729093 Date: 1997
  PW
  This is the detailed history of the clipper Frolic, a sailing ship built in New England in the 1840s specifically for the Asian opium trade: its design and construction; the voyages between Bombay and China; its personal stories of skipper, crew, and owners; its conversion to the Chinese cargo trade to Gold Rush California; and, finally, the end of the Frolic in 1850 when it wrecked on the rocks of the Mendocino coast north of San Francisco.
  Updated 10.24.05