PHILLLIPS — Harry Rothschild, originally from Phillips, is the author of the newly released “Emperor Wu Zhao,” published by Columbia University Press. Susan Cahill of the University of California calls his book “A tour-de-force of textual analysis and historical detective work that leaves previous sensationalistic accounts of Wu Zhao’s rise to power in the dust.”

Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote: “What an original and remarkable story N. Harry Rothschild tells—of ancestors, power and leadership. How a woman in an ancient male-dominated culture employed art and poetry, history and mythology, ritual and violence to create an ancestral line that consolidated her own gender-bending authority; the story of how Empress Wu invented herself as China’s sole female ruler, the Emperor Wu Zhao.”

Rothschild is  a professor of Asian history at University of North Florida. When not in Florida or China, he spends as much time as possible working on the family farm on Tory Hill in Phillips.

This is his second book on the subject of Wu Zhao. His first was “Wu Zhao: China’s only Female Emperor,” published in 2007. He is currently working on a collection of essays, a translation of a Chinese novel and his own fiction.