Casserly, Jack, The Triumph at Tiananmen Square, ASJA Press, 2005.

This is a vivid, eyewitness account by a veteran American news reporter of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Casserly also provides an account of the transformation of China in the 1980s and 1990s into a nation that manages to combine communism with free-market economics.

Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao's Personal Physician, translated by Professor Tai Hung-chao, with the editorial assistance of Anne F. Thurston, Random House, 1994.

This book is referred to in “Immortality.” Li was Mao's physician for thirty years, and in this book he describes Mao's private life, including his medical conditions, such as his dependence on barbiturates, his sexual contacts with young women even when he was an old man, and many other revelations. The memoir makes an intimate but entirely unflattering portrait of a man whom...