Pick All the Cold Branches

A "Ming Dynasty 1566 style" political epic that describes all the party struggles in the Northern Song Dynasty. Everyone is doing what they think is right and then pushing each other off the cliff. In the eighth year of Yuanfeng, Empress Dowager Gao lowered the curtain and Sima Guang returned to the court. The first thing she did was to abolish the new law. But seventeen years later, Zhang Dun used the same "correctness" to liquidate the old party, and Zhezong used the same "correctness" to liquidate the elders - the exemption law was abolished and established, established and abolished, and the names were engraved on party monuments one after another. Sima Guang's stubbornness, Su Shi's broad-mindedness, Zhang Dun's ruthlessness, and the young emperor's forbearance all grew out of the gaps in the historical data. The author writes about power in a desolate way: Sima Guang was no different from Wang Anshi when he took the case, and Zhang Dun was just another Sima Guang when he took revenge. In the section of the Wutai Poetry Case in the book, Su Shi failed to jump off the ship and wrote the fateful sentence "I will be my brother for generations to come", which made my spine shiver when I read it. It writes about the Song Dynasty, but it reflects the present moment: Why do we always believe that "overthrowing and starting over" can solve problems? Why is it that the more convinced a person is that he is right, the more likely he is to become a disaster for others? The title of the book "Pick Up All the Cold Boughs" is taken from Su Shi's "Pick up all the cold branches and refuse to perch" - a bird with nowhere to perch is Dongpo, as well as all the people who have nowhere to rest in the gap between the old and the new.