Asian Review of Books
187 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 3 hours ago - ★★★★★ - 6 ratingsThe Asian Review of Books is the only dedicated pan-Asian book review publication. Widely quoted, referenced, republished by leading publications in Asian and beyond and with an archive of more than two thousand book reviews, the ARB also features long-format essays by leading Asian writers and thinkers, excerpts from newly-published books and reviews of arts and culture.
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Episodes
Monica Macias, "Black Girl from Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity" (Duckworth, 2023)
June 01, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesMonica Macias, the youngest daughter of Equatorial Guinea’s first president at just seven years old, lands in Pyongyang, North Korea in 1979. Her father had sent her to the country to study, but what was meant to be a shorter visit grew to a decade-long stay when her father was ousted in a coup. Monica stays in Pyongyang until 1994, when she graduates from Pyongyang University of Light Industry, and she decides to travel the world: to China, to Spain, to South Korea, to Equatorial Guinea, the...
Baba Padmanji, "Yamuna's Journey" (Speaking Tiger Books, 2022)
May 25, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIn 1856, the East India Company imposed the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act, allowing widows to remarry after their husband’s death. The Act was controversial at the time: Hindu traditionalists, particularly in higher castes, prevented widows from remarrying to protect the family’s honor, and even teenage and child widows were expected to live lives of austerity. The following year, the Marathi author Baba Padmanji publishes Yamuna’s Journey: one of the first, if not the first, novel in an Indian ...
Philip Snow, "China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord" (Yale UP, 2023)
May 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIf there’s a starting point to the relationship between Russia and China, it’s likely the 1650s—when Manchu and Cossack forces clash near Khabarovsk, and when Russia sends its first, and unsuccessful, embassy to China. It’s an inopportune start to four centuries of trade, diplomacy, imperialism, ideology–and a lot of personal griping between different Russian and Chinese leaders, as charted by Philip Snow’s China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale University Press, 2023)...
James M. Zimmerman, "The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China" (PublicAffairs, 2023)
May 11, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesLucy Aldrich, sister-in-law to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and daughter of Rhode Island Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, joked in a letter to her sister that she had an easy out for any boring conversation: For the rest of my life, when I am ‘stalled’ conversationally, it would be a wonderful thing to fall back on: ‘Oh, I must tell you about the time I was captured by Chinese bandits.’ Aldrich was one of many foreign grandees traveling on a 1923 Beijing-bound train from Shanghai, captured by the Shando...
Amitav Acharya, "Tragic Nation: Burma--Why and How Democracy Failed" (Penguin Random House, 2023)
May 04, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesIn mid-April, Myanmar’s military bombed a village in the country’s northwest, killing over a hundred people in what’s been considered the deadliest attack in the now two-year civil war in the country: The result of the Myanmar military’s coup in February 2021. The airstrike happened after my conversation with Professor Amitav Acharya, author of Tragic Nation Burma--Why and How Democracy Failed (Penguin Random House SEA, 2022). Yet it’s a reminder of the coup and the civil war’s consequences f...
Kaamil Ahmed, "I Feel No Peace: Rohingya Fleeing Over Seas and Rivers" (Hurst, 2023)
April 27, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesThe Rohingya population, from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, are a community almost living entirely in exile, whether in refugee camps in Bangladesh, or working on boats throughout the Indian Ocean. The Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, is now the world’s largest. But the Rohingya’s struggles began long before the crisis intensified in 2012 and 2017, as noted in Kaamil Ahmed’s first book, I Feel No Peace: Rohingya Fleeing Over Seas and Rivers (Hurst, 2023). Kaamil talks to Rohingy...
Mai Nardone, "Welcome Me to the Kingdom: Stories" (Random House, 2023)
April 20, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesMai Nardone’s Welcome Me to the Kingdom (Random House, 2023) opens with two migrants from Thailand’s northeast who travel to Bangkok to make a new life for themselves in the bustling city. As they enter, they pass under a sign, asking visitors to “Take Home a Thousand Smiles.” It’s an ironic start to their lives in Bangkok, as the two live an unstable, hardscrabble life on Bangkok’s fringes. The two are just a few of the characters that populate Mai Nardone’s short story collection. From a mi...
Nikhil Menon, "Planning Democracy: Modern India’s Quest for Development" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
April 13, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesIn 2014, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi closed the Planning Commission, which he accused of stifling the country’s growth and being a holdover from the country’s time as a socialist country. It was an ignoble end to the government body, which in the early days of independence charted the country’s Five-Year Plans for economic development. Nikhil Menon, in his first book Planning Democracy: Modern India’s Quest for Development from Cambridge University Press (2022), looks at how India’s e...
Oliver Slow, "Return of the Junta: Why Myanmar’s Military Must Go Back to the Barracks" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
April 06, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesThe Myanmar coup on February 1, 2021 shocked the world, and ended an opening that had fostered hopes for democratization and economic development. The Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, reversed a decade’s worth of changes, and sparked a civil conflict that has continued for two years since the coup. Why did the military launch a coup? What reasons do the Tatmadaw give for seizing such a central role in the country’s affairs? Oliver Slow, a reporter who was based in Myanmar over the past decades, ...
Zeno Sworder, "My Strange Shrinking Parents" (Thames & Hudson, 2023)
March 30, 2023 08:00 - 28 minutesWhen the two immigrant parents in Zeno Sworder’s latest illustrated book go to the baker asking for a cake for their son, the baker asks for something different instead of money. “Five centimeters should do it,” says the baker. “Your height, of course” That starts the story of My Strange Shrinking Parents (Thames & Hudson: 2023): a tale that connects to immigration, parental sacrifice, and the changing perspective that comes with growing up. In this interview, Zeno and I talk about immigrant ...
Weijian Shan, "Money Machine: A Trailblazing American Venture in China" (Wiley, 2023)
March 23, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesIn 2010, Ping An took over Shenzhen Development Bank, ending an experiment that had never been tried before, and not been tried since: a foreign company owning and managing a Chinese bank. Newbridge Capital, a private equity firm, shocked the financial world when it agreed to take over the bank five years earlier–and successfully made it a pioneer. Weijian Shan, then a partner in Newbridge Capital, writes about the whole escapade in his third book Money Machine: A Trailblazing American Ventur...
Lawrence Osborne, "On Java Road: A Novel" (Hogarth Press, 2022)
March 16, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutesThe star of On Java Road (Hogarth: 2022), the latest novel from Lawrence Osborne, is Adrian Gyle, a down-on-his-luck correspondent in Hong Kong, in the midst of its 2019 protests. Adrian spends his time drinking with Jimmy Tang, a royal screw-up from one of Hong Kong’s tycoon families. But a new character–and an unexpected death–threatens to drive a wedge in their relationship, as Hong Kong is mired in an uncertain future. Lawrence Osborne is the author of The Glass Kingdom, The Forgiven, The...
Xin Wen, "The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 09, 2023 09:00 - 47 minutesMany of us–who maybe aren’t historians–have an image of the Silk Road: merchants who carried silk from China to as far as ancient Rome, in one of the first global trading networks. Historians have since challenged the idea that there really was such an organized network, instead seeing it as a nineteenth-century metaphor that obscures as much as it explains. But Xin Wen, the author of The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press, 2023), tries to rev...
Steve Kemper, "Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor" (Mariner Books, 2022)
March 02, 2023 09:00 - 44 minutesIn the years leading up to the Second World War, the U.S. was represented in Japan by Ambassador Joseph Grew: born from a patrician family, Harvard-educated, ran away to the foreign service, and deeply respected by his fellow diplomats and Japanese politicians alike. From his arrival in Tokyo in 1932 to when he was eventually repatriated back to the US in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, Grew dutifully reported to and advised the U.S. on what to do with an increasingly imperialist, militarist—and, a...
Kyla Zhao, "The Fraud Squad" (Berkley Books, 2023)
February 23, 2023 09:00 - 25 minutesCan anyone break into high society? From Cinderella, Eliza Doolittle and Jay Gatsby to Don Draper and Anna Sorokin, characters that can fool their way into the elite through their smarts, willpower and chutzpah help us pierce the pretensions of the rich. Kyla Zhao, in her debut novel, The Fraud Squad (Berkley Books: 2023) creates her own version of the character in Samantha Song, a harried writer at a Singaporean public relations firm who embarks on a scheme with a close friend and a very han...
John D. Hosler, "Jerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace" (Yale UP, 2022)
February 16, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesWhen the armies of the Rashidun Caliphate entered Jerusalem in 638, the city was quite different from what it is today–one of the most important cities for three religions. As John Hosler writes in his latest book, Jerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace (Yale University Press, 2022): “Three things may seem nearly inconceivable to modern readers: that the Temple Mount, a place of such incredible significance and symbolism, once served as Jerusalem’s garbage dump; that it once went w...
Mark Eveleigh, "Kopi Dulu: Caffeine-Fuelled Island-Hopping Through Indonesia" (Penguin Southeast Asia, 2022)
February 09, 2023 09:00 - 35 minutes“Kopi Dulu,” means “coffee first” in Indonesian–a common phrase from Indonesians who are happy to have coffee anywhere, anytime and with anyone. At least, that was Mark Eveleigh’s experience, as a travel writer and reporter, traveling across the country’s many islands. The phrase gives us the title of his latest book: Kopi Dulu: Caffeine-Fuelled Travels Through Indonesia (Penguin Southeast Asia, 2022). Mark travels through Indonesia’s cities and villages, jungles and seas, sharing his experie...
Angela Hui, "Takeaway: Stories from a Childhood Behind the Counter" (Trapeze, 2022)
February 02, 2023 09:00 - 44 minutesFood journalist Angela Hui grew up in rural Wales, as daughter to the owners of the Lucky Star Chinese takeaway. Angela grew up behind the counter, helping take orders and serve customers, while also trying to find her place in this small Welsh town. In her new memoir, Takeaway: Stories from a Childhood behind the Counter (Trapeze, 2022), she writes about the surprisingly central role the takeaway plays in rural Britain: Name me one other room where you can blow out birthday candles, watch a ...
Uther Charlton-Stevens, "Anglo-India and the End of Empire" (Oxford UP, 2022)
January 26, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesIt can be easy to think of colonies as having two populations: colonial subjects, and colonial overlords from Europe. It’s an easy narrative: one has power, status and privilege, the other does not. But in practice, European colonies created many populations in-between: groups who benefited from imperial power, yet not one of the elite. Britain’s almost two-and-a-half centuries-long presence in India created its own local Eurasian community: the Anglo-Indians, the descendents of marriages bet...
Jeff Fearnside, "Ships in the Desert" (Santa Fe Writer's Project, 2022)
January 19, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesMany of us have likely seen photos of the Aral Sea, and the rusted Soviet-era ships, sitting in the desert with no water in sight. The Aral Sea is now just 10% of its former volume, shrinking down from what was once the fourth-largest body of inland water in the world, after what writer Jeff Fernside calls “one of the worst human-caused environmental catastrophes.” Jeff traveled to the region as a Peace Corps volunteer. Afterward, he turned his experiences into an essay collection, Ships in t...
Jayita Sarkar, "Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2022)
January 12, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesIn 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way. The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India’s ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar’s Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global...
Ronald H. Spector, "A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955" (Norton, 2023)
January 05, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesOn September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. Yet the Japanese invasion had upended the old geopolitical structures of European empires, leaving old imperial powers on the decline and new groups calling for independence on the rise. That unsteady situation sparked a decade of conflict: in Indonesia, in Vietnam, in China and in Korea, as esteemed military historian Professor Ronald Spector writes about in his latest book, A Continent Erupts: Decolon...
Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi, "Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present" (Oxford UP, 2022)
December 29, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesWhat does it mean to be a meritocracy? Ask an ordinary person, and they would likely say it means promoting the best and brightest in today’s society based on merit. But that simple explanation belies many thorny questions. What is merit? How do we measure talent? How does equality come into play? And how do we ensure that meritocracies don’t degenerate into the same old privileged systems they strived to replace? Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi write in their edited volume Making Meritocracy...
John D. Wong, "Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s-1998" (Harvard UP, 2022)
December 22, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutesOn July 6, 1998, the last flight took off from Kai Tak International Airport, marking the end of an era for Hong Kong aviation. For decades, international flights flew over the roofs of Kowloon apartments, before landing on Kai Tak’s runway, extending out into the harbor. Kai Tak–frankly, a terrible place for one of the world’s busiest international airports–is a good symbol of the story of Hong Kong’s aviation, as told in Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global...
Michael X. Wang, "Lost in the Long March" (Overlook Press, 2022)
December 15, 2022 09:00 - 43 minutesIn 1934, tens of thousands of Communist guerillas fled Jiangxi, in an extended retreat through hazardous terrain to Shaanxi in the north, while under fire from their Nationalist enemies. The Long March, as it became to be known, helped build the legend of the Chinese Communist Party, and of its leader Mao. While on the Long March, Mao had a daughter, who was left behind to live with a local family due to the trek’s dangers That event inspired Michael X. Wang’s debut novel Lost in the Long Mar...
Jamil Jan Kochai, "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories" (Viking, 2022)
December 08, 2022 09:00 - 32 minutesThe first story in Jamil Jan Kochai’s newest collection has an interesting title and premise. “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” leads The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking: 2022). But what starts as a story of a young Afghan-American man buying the latest installment of the stealth video game becomes an exploration of Afghanistan, how its borne the brunt of generations of imperial and geopolitical conflict–and how that history is etched on its people. Jamil’s book...
Joseph Sassoon, "The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire" (Pantheon Books, 2022)
December 01, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutesThe Sassoons were one of the great merchant families of the nineteenth century, alongside such names as the Jardines, the Mathesons, and the Swires. They dominated the India-China opium trade through the David Sassoon and E.D. Sassoon companies. They became Indian tycoons, English aristocracy, Hong Kong board directors, and Shanghai real estate moguls. Yet unlike the Kadoories and Swires, the Sassoon companies no longer exist today. Professor Joseph Sassoon in his latest book The Sassoons: Th...
John Keay, "Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
November 24, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutes“History has not been kind to Himalaya,” writes historian and travel writer John Keay in his latest book Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022). The region, nestled between India, China and Central Asia, has long been subject to political and imperial intrigue–and at times violent invasion. But the region also provided a wealth of scientific information, like geographers puzzling over how these tall peaks were thrust upwards by plate tectonics. And, of course,...
Eric Tagliocozzo, "In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama" (Princeton UP, 2022)
November 17, 2022 09:00 - 35 minutesIn the nineteenth century, one group of American merchants reported an odd request from the Vietnamese emperor. An envoy asked if the traders could help procure a commodity brought by a previous delegation: a precious good that turned out to be a bottle of Best Durham bottled mustard. That’s one small anecdote in Eric Tagliocozzo’s latest book, In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama (Princeton University Press: 2022), which charts hundreds of years of history across Asia’s wat...
Hua Hsu, "Stay True: A Memoir" (Doubleday, 2022)
November 10, 2022 09:00 - 31 minutesStay True (Doubleday: 2022), the new memoir from Hua Hsu, is a coming-of-age story about the writer’s time in the University of California in Berkeley, where he tries to become a writer–and becomes a bit of a music snob. He builds a close friendship with another Asian-American student, Ken, very different from Hua, about which he writes in the book: "All the previous times I had met poised, content people like Ken, they were white. It’s one of those obscure parts of an already obscure identit...
Mark Vanhoenacker, "Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World" (Knopf, 2022)
November 03, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesHow does a pilot see the cities of the world? Unlike residents, who live there full-time, or tourists, who travel once and perhaps never again, pilots are brief, but regular visitors to the hubs of the world. In Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World (Chatto & Windus / Knopf: 2022), Mark Vanhoenacker helps to give us an answer. In his book, Mark charts his flights all over the world, to cities like Hong Kong, Jeddah, Rio, Cape Town, Sapporo, Delhi, and many more. But the boo...
Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, "The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China" (U Washington Press, 2022)
October 27, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesIn the strategy game Civilization VI, where players choose world leaders to be their avatar, Qin Shihuang, the First Emperor of China, has one goal in mind: building wonders (like the Great Wall of China). His workers can build wonders faster and more cheaply, and he hates leaders that build more wonders than he does. That largely corresponds to how people in the West think of the First Emperor: powerful, responsible for unifying China, despotic–and focused on building great works like the Gr...
Mansi Choksi, "The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India" (Atria Books, 2022)
October 20, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesTwo neighbors from the same village fall in love and elope to a shelter for couples that break caste norms. A Hindu woman falls in love with a Muslim man, drawing the ire of Hindu nationalists. Two women start a lesbian relationship. These three couples are the protagonists of Mansi Choksi’s The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India (Atria Book, 2022). This work charts the lives of Dawinder and Neetu, Monika and Arif, Reshma and Preethi, who all break social norms in their relations...
Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)
October 13, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutes“We’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” That’s the new China strategy as outlined by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. But just exactly how countries should deal with China—including working with it, when the times call for it—is perhaps the thorniest question in international relations right now, at least in the West. Scott Moore gives his framework on the U.S. and China in China's Next Act: How Sustainability and...
John Saeki, "The Last Tigers of Hong Kong: True Stories of Big Cats That Stalked the Hills Beyond the City" (Blacksmith Books, 2021)
October 06, 2022 08:00 - 34 minutesMost Hong Kong residents nowadays only have to worry about a wandering boar or an aggressive monkey in their day-to-day lives. But for much of its history, those living in the British colony were worried about a very different form of wildlife: the South China tiger. Not that their British overlords always believed them, as John Saeki notes in his book The Last Tigers of Hong Kong: True Stories of Big Cats that Stalked Britain's Chinese Colony (Blacksmith Books: 2022). Police officers, civil ...
Rahul Sagar, "To Raise a Fallen People: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Indian Views on International Politics" (Columbia UP, 2022)
September 29, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesMost people tend to mark the beginning of Indian international relations thought to Nehru, and his self-proclaimed attempt to build a true non-aligned movement and more enlightened international system. But Indian thought didn’t emerge sui generis after Indian independence, as Rahul Sagar notes in his edited anthology, To Raise a Fallen People: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Indian Views on International Politics (Juggernaut / Columbia University Press: 2022). Rahul collects writings from ...
Hannah Kirshner, "Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town" (Penguin, 2022)
September 22, 2022 08:00 - 35 minutesA young sake bar owner, Yusuke Shimoki, arrives on the doorstep of Hannah Kirshner’s Brooklyn apartment “with a suitcase full of Ishikawa sake,” in Hannah’s words. That visit sparked a years-long connection between Hannah and the rural Japanese community of Yamanaka, a home for artisans and artists, hunters and farmers, and other ordinary Japanese trying to live in the countryside. Those visits are the subject of Hannah’s book, Water Wood and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a J...
Manoj Joshi, "Understanding the India-China Border: The Enduring Threat of War in High Himalaya" (Hurst, 2022)
September 13, 2022 08:00 - 37 minutesOn June 16 2020, Indian and Chinese forces clashed high in the Himalayan mountains in Aksai Chin. Beijing and New Delhi both claim control over this remote region in a territorial dispute dating back decades. Sources differ on how many soldiers died in the skirmish, fought with fists and clubs rather than guns, with the potential dead ranging into the dozens. Looking back two years later, Galwan marked a clear turning point in relations between the two Asian countries, with India now taking a...
William C. Kirby, "Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China" (Harvard UP, 2022)
September 08, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesEarlier this month, U.S. President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, a bill purportedly meant to revive U.S. dominance in research and development. “We used to rank number one in the world in research and development; now we rank number nine,” Biden said at the signing ceremony. “China was number eight decades ago; now they are number two.” And a recent study from Japan’s science ministry reported that China now leads the world not just in quantity of scientific research, but in qua...
Matthew Teller, "Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City" (Other Press, 2022)
September 01, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesJerusalem’s Old City is normally understood to be split into four quarters: the Jewish Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, the Christian Quarter, and the Muslim Quarter. Those designations can be found on maps, on guidebooks, on news articles, and countless other pieces of writing about the city. But as Matthew Teller points out in his latest book, Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City (Profile Books / Other Press, 2022): the idea of the “four quarters” is entirely a nineteen...
Lan Samantha Chang, "The Family Chao: A Novel" (Norton, 2022)
August 25, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesThe Fine Chao, a Chinese restaurant in the town of Haven, is known for its food and its boisterous owner, Big Leo Chao. Leo is loud, assertive and aggressive, sexually explicit in a way unmatched in his three sons, Dagou, Ming and James, who all take after–and despise–their father in differing ways. The Chao family are the protagonists of Lan Samantha Chang’s newest novel, appropriately titled The Family Chao (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022). What starts as a family drama turns into a crime nov...
Annah Lake Zhu, "Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China" (Harvard UP, 2022)
August 18, 2022 08:00 - 37 minutesMoney does strange things to people, as Annah Lake Zhu notes in her latest book Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China (Harvard University Press: 2022) In Madagascar, loggers, flush with cash from the rosewood trade, don’t quite know how to react to their newfound largesse, sometimes demanding less money for their wares out of confusion. Rumors abound of how loggers make their money. There’s no way that simple wood could garner so much profit, people say, so ob...
Helen Pfeifer, "Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in Early Modern Ottoman Lands" (Princeton UP, 2022)
August 11, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesIt’s the sixteenth century, and the Ottoman Empire has just defeated the Mamluk Sultanate, conquering Damascus and Cairo, important centers of Arab learning and culture. But how did these two groups–Arabs and “Rumis”, a term used to refer to those living in Anatolia, interact? How did Arabs deal with these powerful upstarts–and how did Rumis try to work with their learned, yet defeated, subjects? Dr. Helen Pfeifer studies one venue where Arabs and Rumis in the Ottoman Empire interacted, learn...
Ramon Pacheco Pardo, "Shrimp to Whale: South Korea from the Forgotten War to K-Pop" (Oxford UP, 2022)
August 04, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesIf there’s a country that “punches above its weight”, it’s South Korea. It’s home to some of the world’s largest and most important companies, and the source of pop culture that dominates Asia—and even planted a foothold in the West. But the country’s growth would have been astounding to those at the end of the Korean War. The Republic of Korea was poor, devastated by war, and stuck deep in Cold War politics. Shrimp to Whale: South Korea from the Forgotten War to K-Pop (Hurst, 2022) by Ramon ...
Lachlan Fleetwood, "Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
July 28, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesToday, the idea that the Himalayas have the world’s tallest peaks—by a large margin—is entirely uncontroversial. Just about anyone can name Mount Everest and K2 as the world’s tallest and second-tallest mountains respectively. But the idea that this mountain range had the highest summits used to be quite controversial. Mountaineers claimed that the Himalayas could not be taller than peaks in Europe or South America, like Ecuador’s Chimborazo. Even when it was proven that the Himalayas were ta...
The Kushnameh: The Persian Epic of Kush the Tusked
July 21, 2022 08:00 - 39 minutesThe Kushnameh is unique, literally. Only one copy of the “Epic of Kush”exists, sitting in the British Library. Hardly anything is known about its author, Iranshah. It features a quite villainous protagonist, the tusked warrior Kush, who carves a swathe of destruction across the region. And it spans nearly half the world, with episodes in Spain, the Maghreb, India, China and even Korea. It was that last reference that encouraged academics in Korea to study the Kushnameh, and bring Kaveh Hemmat...
Jennifer Lin, "Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra's Historic Journey to China" (Temple UP, 2022)
July 14, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutesIn 1973, the Philadelphia Orchestra boarded a Pan Am 707 plane in Philadelphia for a once-in-a-lifetime journey: a multi-city tour of Maoist China, months after Nixon’s history-making visit. There was drama immediately after they landed in Shanghai. Chinese officials asked for a last-minute change to the program: Beethoven’s Sixth. After protests that the Orchestra didn’t bring scores with them, officials returned with copies haphazardly sourced from across the country, with different notati...
Gish Jen, "Thank You, Mr. Nixon: Stories" (Knopf, 2022)
July 07, 2022 08:00 - 31 minutesFifty years ago, President Richard Nixon stepped off a plane in Beijing: a visit that changed the course of China, the U.S., the Cold war and the world. The stories in Gish Jen’s newest story collection, Thank You Mr. Nixon: Stories (Knopf: 2022), covers stories spanning the fifty-year relationship since then, from a Chinese woman press-ganged into translating for her Western tour group, to an English professor struggling to teach the wealthy Chinese students at his university. Gish Jen is th...
Vauhini Vara, "The Immortal King Rao: A Novel" (W. W. Norton, 2022)
June 30, 2022 08:00 - 33 minutesKing Rao–one of the protagonists from Vauhini Vara’s novel The Immortal King Rao (W. W. Norton & Company: 2022)—is like many of the tech founders we idolize today. King comes from humble beginnings—born into a Dalit family in a coconut grove in India–moves to the U.S., and launches a company that ends up dominating the world. But Vauhini’s novel is also the story of King’s daughter Athena, living in the world created by her father’s company: a world of social credit, “hothouse earth” and “Sha...
Mick Conefrey, "Everest 1922: The Epic Story of the First Attempt on the World's Highest Mountain" (Pegasus Books, 2022)
June 23, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesIt can be hard to think of Everest as unknown anymore. While it’s certainly a challenge to climb the world’s tallest mountain, someone–with enough time and money–has a good chance of making it to the summit. A potential mountaineer can fly into Kathmandu, travel to a well-stocked base camp, be escorted up a well-trodden route by expert sherpas. There’s even Wifi at the peak. The relative ease of climbing Everest is born from almost a century of attempted expeditions up the mountain, to determ...