Just trying to cope with the BBC news headlines these days.

1. Dutch cabinet collapses in dispute over Afghanistan.
2. US officials are investigating whether the crash, involving a plane piloted by Joseph Andrew Stack, was a deliberate attack on a tax office.
3. Portugal rushes aid to Madeira after deadly floods.
4. China anger at Dalai Lama-Obama meeting.
5. Russian ex-police boss gets life for supermarket murder.
6. Brothel remark Irish defence minister O'Dea resigns.
7. Far-right Czech Workers' Party to challenge court ban.
8. No Kenya crisis, says President Mwai Kibaki.
9. Women at war: How roles are changing.
10. Thousands rally in support of Niger coup.
11. ICC: Guinea killings 'crime against humanity'.
12. Rwandan capital Kigali hit by deadly grenade attacks.
13. Several dead in Ivory Coast clashes.

1421: The Year China Discovered the World

How much fantasy can one bid on a historic re-interpretation of scattered facts and still get away with it? This seems to be the balance that Mr. Menzies is trying to strike in this book - might that be for fun, for curiosity, or for the sake of playing mind games and trying to re-write history at the same time.
The fact that the book's controversial is an understatement: its potential is so great that it might actually be able to redefine the notion of 'controversy'. So if you can play along with that, then it won't frustrate you to read it. But if it's hard facts proven by science alone, this might come as a bit of an off-tracker.
Take CSI, House M.D. or Dexter and apply the sort of investigation scenarios done in those scripts to history -- almost 600 years ago. This does sound a bit tricky in itself, doesn't it? And it gets even trickier as the entirety of the evidence it brings to supporting the ideas [plural] behind the writing is circumstantial, at best.

So what's the big mystery behind it? It's a re-conceptualisation of the Discoveries and who had really undertaken them: Mr. Menzies basically says it in the title of his book: he considers that it was the Chinese rather than the Europeans who had first discovered and mapped the world as we know it - and with highly accurate results, for that matter. He then goes on to say that the Europeans managed to get hold of these Chinese maps at the same time that the Chinese decided to plunge into a [new?] age of isolationism.
This would sound as an agreeable theory at first -never mind that you've never heard of it on the telly or otherwise- if it hadn't been for the manner in which it's unraveled: the way to deal with facts is by starting off with the assumption that they will prove the theory/ies, followed by the assumption that they do in fact prove it/them and concluding with the confirmation that it's all been proven. [For more on punctual criticisms look here.]

[Finally, the translation of the Romanian copy I've read doesn't help much either: many times I had to re-translate the book back into English in order to understand the message behind the words. Possibly this has been one of the greatest difficulties in my appreciation of it.]

Bottom line: if you can find humour in new theories, this is the holidays book for you! If you are however easily bored with facts which might not come as straightforward and are rather seeking the ultimate truth, then this book should prove as rather challenging instead.

[Image credits go here.]
P.S. This is the book's website: 1421.tv

Plot: "Seven warriors come together to protect a village from a diabolical General." [2005]

In the mid-1600s, the Manchurians have taken over sovereignty of China and established the Qing Dynasty. While nationalistic sentiments start brewing within the martial artists' community (Jianghu), the Qing government immediately imposes a Martial Arts Ban (禁武令), forbidding the common people to practice martial arts. This is a means of maintaining law and order, as well as provide the Qing government with sufficient reason to put down any potential rebellion by nationalist martial artists. Fire-Wind, a military officer who formerly served the fallen Ming Dynasty, sees the new law as an opportunity for himself to make fortune by assisting the government in executing the law. Greedy, cruel and immoral, Fire-Wind ravages northwest China, killing thousands of martial artists as well as innocent civilians with his army. His next goal is to attack the final frontier Martial Village (武莊), which, as its name suggests, is a home to a number of martial artists.

Taken from the "Seven Swords" Wiki entry: here.

To remeber = [v. intr.] To have or use the power of memory

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 culminating in the Tiananmen Square massacre (referred to in Chinese as the June 4 Incident, to avoid confusion with two other Tiananmen Square protests) were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People's Republic of China (PRC) beginning on April 14. Led mainly by students and intellectuals, the protests occurred in a year that saw the collapse of a number of communist governments around the world.
The protests were sparked by the death of pro-market, pro-democracy and anti-corruption official, Hu Yaobang, whom protesters wanted to mourn. By the eve of Hu's funeral, 1,000,000 people had gathered on the Tiananmen square. The protests lacked a unified cause or leadership; participants included disillusioned Communist Party members and Trotskyists as well as free market reformers, who were generally against the government's authoritarianism and voiced calls for economic change and democratic reform within the structure of the government. The demonstrations centered on Tiananmen Square, in Beijing, but large-scale protests also occurred in cities throughout China, including Shanghai, which remained peaceful throughout the protests.
The movement lasted seven weeks, from Hu's death on April 15 until tanks cleared Tiananmen Square on June 4. In Beijing, the resulting military response to the protesters by the PRC government left many civilians dead or severely injured. The number of deaths is not known and many different estimates exist. There were early reports of Chinese Red Cross sources giving a figure of 2,600 deaths, but the Chinese Red Cross has denied ever doing so. The official Chinese government figure is 241 dead, including soldiers, and 7,000 wounded.
Following the violence, the government conducted widespread arrests to suppress protesters and their supporters, cracked down on other protests around China, banned the foreign press from the country and strictly controlled coverage of the events in the PRC press. Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government.

From Wikipedia: Tiananmen Square protests of 1989