New Books in East Asian Studies
1,316 episodes - English - Latest episode: 7 days ago - ★★★★★ - 55 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of East Asia about their New Books
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Episodes
Endymion Wilkinson, “Chinese History: A New Manual” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012)
March 08, 2013 14:59 - 1 hourThere are some books that are so fundamental to work in an academic field that practitioners refer to them simply by the author’s last name. Many of us had respectfully and affectionately referred to Endymion Wilkinson‘s Chinese History: A Manual, Revised and Enlarged (2000) simply as “Wilkinson” (or, “The Yellow... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Elizabeth J. Perry, “Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition” (University of California Press, 2012)
March 05, 2013 13:32 - 1 hourAnyuan was a town of coal miners. It was a place where local secret societies held power, where rebellion and violence were part of the life of local laborers, and where the Chinese Communist revolution was experienced especially early and particularly intensely. In her meticulously researched and elegantly narrated new... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Gennifer Weisenfeld, “Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923” (University of California Press, 2012)
March 01, 2013 13:31 - 1 hourGennifer Weisenfeld‘s gorgeous and thoughtful new book explores the visual culture that emerged in the wake of the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012) charts a path through the widely-circulating visual tropes that comprised... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-...
Bruce Rusk, “Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature” (Harvard UP, 2012)
February 12, 2013 06:00 - 1 hourWhat makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Kevin Gray Carr, “Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping of Medieval Japanese Buddhism” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012)
February 06, 2013 15:53 - 1 hourKevin Gray Carr‘s beautiful new book explores the figure of Prince Shotoku (573? – 622?) the focus of one of the most widespread visual cults in Japanese history. Introducing us to a range of stories materialized in both verbal and visual narratives, Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Barbara R. Ambros, “Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012)
January 30, 2013 15:44 - 1 hourIt opens with a parakeet named Homer, and it closes with a dog named Hachiko. In the intervening pages, Barbara Ambros explores the deaths, afterlives, and necrogeographies of pets in contemporary Japan. Bones of Contention:Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) takes readers through the urban... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-as...
Michael Gibbs Hill, “Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture” (Oxford UP, 2013)
January 23, 2013 15:38 - 1 hourWhat do “Rip van Winkle,” Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Aesop’s Fables have in common? All of them were translated into Chinese by Lin Shu (Lin Qinnan, 1852-1924), a major force in the literary culture of late Qing and early Republican China. In Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Richard J. Smith, “The I Ching: A Biography” (Princeton UP, 2012)
January 16, 2013 19:46 - 1 hourTexts have lives. They grow, travel, transform, fade, and are reborn into new and other lives. In The I Ching: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2012), Richard J. Smith has given us a wonderfully readable (and assignable, and shareable, and enjoyable) life of one of the most important texts in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Gene Cooper, “The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China: Red Fire” (Routledge, 2013)
January 10, 2013 14:43 - 1 hourGene Cooper‘s new book is a multi-sited ethnographic study of market and temple fairs in the region of Jinhua, a city on the east coast of China and the home of Hengdian, “China’s Hollywood.” The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China: Red Fire (Routledge, 2013) weaves together historical and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Barak Kushner, “Slurp!: A Social and Culinary History of Ramen – Japan’s Favorite Noodle Soup” (Global Oriental, 2012)
December 20, 2012 16:53 - 1 hourI bet you’ve never heard of the “Smash the Baltic Fleet Memorial Togo Marshmallow.” I hadn’t either, before reading Barak Kushner‘s lively and illuminating new book on the history of ramen in Japan. Grounded in ample research that incorporates archival and ethnographic methods, Slurp!: A Social and Culinary History of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Jack W. Chen, “The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty” (Harvard Yenching Institute, 2010)
December 13, 2012 22:23 - 1 hourAfter coming to power in a series of violent and deceptive acts, including tricking his father into cuckolding the Emperor, Li Shimin went on to become a ruler whose reign as Emperor Taizong has been hailed as a model of good government throughout East Asia. Jack W. Chen‘s recent book... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Thomas David DuBois, “Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia” (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
December 13, 2012 21:57 - 1 hourDo historians of East Asia sufficiently account for the role of religious communities in the construction of history? Of course, there are histories of the Taiping Rebellion, and groups like Soka Gakkai or Falungong. But have historians probed how these movements have shaped the history of China and Japan more... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Michael David Kaulana Ing, “The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism” (Oxford University Press, 2012)
December 03, 2012 19:27 - 1 hourHow did the authors of the one of the most important Confucian ritual texts in early China recognize, explain, and cope with mistakes and dysfunction in ritual? The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism (Oxford University Press, 2012) brings readers into the intricacies of the text of the Liji. Michael... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Cosima Bruno, “Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation” (Brill, 2012)
November 26, 2012 13:54 - 57 minutesCosima Bruno‘s new book asks us to consider a deceptively simple question: what is the relationship between a poem and its translation? In the course of Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation (Brill, 2012), Bruno helps us imagine what an answer to that question might look like while... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Christopher Bush, “Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media” (Oxford UP, 2010)
November 13, 2012 21:01 - 1 hourOrientalism, the ideograph, and media theory grew up together. In Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford University Press, 2010), Christopher Bush offers a wonderfully trans-disciplinary account of modernism through the figure of the ideograph, or Chinese writing as imagined in the West. The beginning of the book introduces the ways... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingc...
Jini Kim Watson, “The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
November 06, 2012 20:35 - 1 hourJini Kim Watson‘s book links literature, architecture, urban studies, film, and economic history into a wonderfully rich account of the fictions of urban transformation in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Ranging from the colonial period to the late 1980s, The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-...
Shih-Shan Susan Huang, “Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012)
October 31, 2012 16:37 - 1 hourShih-Shan Susan Huang‘s beautiful new book explores visual culture of religious Daoism, focusing on the tenth through the thirteenth centuries. Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012) is divided into two sections, devoted loosely to esoteric and exoteric realms of knowledge. The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcas...
Carl S. Yamamoto, “Vision and Violence: Lama Zhang and the Politics of Charisma in Twelfth-Century Tibet” (Brill, 2012)
October 24, 2012 19:39 - 1 hourLama Zhang, the controversial central figure in Carl S. Yamamoto‘s new book may or may not have participated in animal sacrifice, sneezed out a snake-like creature, and engaged in other acts of putative sorcery early in his life. What we can say about this fascinating character, however, is that he... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Christopher Nugent, “Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010)
October 13, 2012 16:21 - 1 hourChristopher Nugent‘s wonderful recent book will change the way you read. At the very least, Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) will transform the way we think and write about medieval poetry in China. Nugent’s book urges... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Jason Josephson, “The Invention of Religion in Japan” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
October 13, 2012 15:00 - 1 hourIn 1853, the Japanese were required to consider what the word religion meant when western powers compelled the Tokugawa government to ensure freedom of religion to Christian missionaries. The challenge this request posed was based on the fact that prior to the nineteenth century Japanese language had no parallel terminology... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Shawn Bender, “Taiko Boom: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion” (University of California Press, 2012)
October 13, 2012 10:07 - 1 hourSince the “taiko boom” of the closing decades of the 20thcentury, taiko drumming has arguably become Japan’s most globally successful performance medium. Shawn Bender‘s recent book takes us through the history and spaces of this art, from the stretching of animal skins to make its instruments through the seemingly incongruous... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-stu...
Giusi Tamburello, “Concepts and Categories of Emotion in East Asia” (Carocci editore, 2012)
October 04, 2012 19:41 - 57 minutesWhat is the relationship between language and the emotions? Where ought we look for evidence of emotion in historical and literary texts? Is it possible to talk about the emotional states of entire cultures or groups of peoples, and if so, how should that level be reconciled with that of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Qiliang He, “Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta since 1949” (Brill, 2012)
September 27, 2012 11:53 - 1 hourUsing the example of pingtan storytelling to reexamine the history of cultural reform in the People’s Republic of China, Qiliang He‘s new book integrates political history and performance studies to challenge some widely-held assumptions about the history of the arts in modern China. In Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/e...
Amy Stanley, “Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan” (University of California Press, 2012)
September 19, 2012 18:46 - 1 hourWith prose that is as elegant as the argument is clear, Amy Stanley‘s new book tells a social, cultural, and economic history of Tokugawa Japan through the prism of prostitution. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2012 ) undermines our assumptions... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Par Cassel, “Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan” (Oxford UP, 2012)
September 13, 2012 13:46 - 1 hourExtraterritoriality was not grafted whole onto East Asian societies: it developed over time and in a relationship with local precedents, institutions, and understandings of power. Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2012) uses a trans-regional and transnational focus to explore the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbo...
Alan Christy (trans.), Amino Yoshihiko, “Rethinking Japanese History” (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2012)
September 05, 2012 19:41 - 1 hourWe don’t often make the chance to properly acknowledge the importance of translation to the understanding of history, let alone to talk about it at any length. Alan Christy has done a wonderful service in his careful, elegant, and accessible translation of Amino Yoshihiko‘s Rethinking Japanese History (Center for Japanese... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Gregory Crouch, “China’s Wings” (Bantam Books, 2012)
August 30, 2012 14:24 - 55 minutesWhen I was a kid I loved the movie “The Flying Tigers.” You know, the one with John Wayne about the intrepid American volunteers sent to China to fight the Japanese before the United States really could fight the Japanese. I recall building a model of one of their P-40... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson, “Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare” (Churchill Livingstone, 2011)
August 25, 2012 10:50 - 1 hourVolker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson‘s Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare (Churchill Livingstone, 2011) is the result of a wonderfully transdisciplinary project that aims to bring scholars and practitioners of East Asian medicine together in a common dialogue that also informs and is shaped by cutting-edge work in Science... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcas...
Marnie Anderson, “A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010)
August 24, 2012 14:06 - 46 minutesIn the late nineteenth century the Japanese elite embarked on an aggressive, ambitious program of modernization known in the West as the “Meiji Restoration.” In a remarkably short period of time, they transformed Japan: what was a thoroughly traditional, quasi-feudal welter of agricultural estates became a modern industrial nation-state. Since... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast...
Miryam Sas, “Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)
August 23, 2012 19:39 - 1 hourMiryam Sas’ Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exceptionally rich study that has a great deal to offer scholars across the humanities. The book looks at the experimental arts in postwar Japan in a study that ranges... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Kenneth Brashier, “Ancestral Memory in Early China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)
August 17, 2012 20:40 - 1 hourIf New Books in East Asian Studies were an All-Powerful Force of Good In The Universe and if one of the perks that came along with being an All-Powerful Force of Good In The Universe were to ensure that certain books got major awards, then we would exercise that perk... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Roel Sterckx, “Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
August 11, 2012 20:58 - 1 hourRoel Sterckx‘s book Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China (Cambridge University Press, 2011) had me at drunken seances. (Drunken seances! Do you really need another excuse to read it?) It is a compelling and engaging read, and a wonderful resource for anyone interested in early China, the history of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Roger Hart, “The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011)
July 27, 2012 20:13 - 1 hourRoger Hart‘s The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) is the first book-length study of linear algebra in imperial China, and is based on an astounding combination of erudition and expertise in both Chinese history and the practice and history of linear algebra. Alternating among an... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Daniel Vukovich, “China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C.” (Routledge, 2012)
July 17, 2012 21:28 - 1 hourUsing materials that range from poetry and fiction to historiography and film, China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C. (Routledge, 2011) proposes a sharp critique of the way that China’s history from 1949-1979 has been understood and written in a wide variety of texts. Daniel Vukovich argues that... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, “Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing” (Zone Press, 2012)
July 09, 2012 18:10 - 1 hourWhat do walking backward, water calligraphy, and belting out popular songs in public have in common? All of them can be conceived as techniques for cultivating life, or yangsheng, and they are all featured in Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang‘s wonderful new book. Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Ethan Segal, “Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)
July 02, 2012 14:02 - 1 hourWhat did money mean to the people of medieval Japan? In Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), Ethan Segal takes readers through a fascinating exploration of the politics, society, and culture of pre-1600 Japan. One of the wonderful things about... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Merry White, “Coffee Life in Japan” (University of California Press, 2012)
June 15, 2012 17:13 - 51 minutesMerry (Corky) White‘s new book Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2012) opens with a memory of stripping naked and being painted blue in an underground coffeehouse, and closes with a guide to some of the author’s favorite cafes in Japan. This framing alone is worth the price... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Gail Hershatter, “The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past” (University of California Press, 2011)
May 23, 2012 13:50 - 1 hourWhen I teach my course on gender, sexuality, and human rights, my students invariably want to talk about China’s one-child policy. They imagine living in a state where the government tells you how many children you can have – and they’re horrified. One thing I learned from reading Gail Hershatter‘s... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Xiaofei Tian, "Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China" (Harvard UP, 2011)
May 23, 2012 08:00 - 1 hourXiaofei Tian's Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a model of comparative history. A study of travel writing in early medieval and nineteenth-century China,Visionary Journeys uses this juxtaposition to tell a surprising, rich, and beautiful story of travelers and their experiences of dislocation over land and sea, in heaven and hell, in poems and prose, in China and beyond. The book uses a wonderfully t...
E. Taylor Atkins, "Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945" (U California Press, 2010)
May 15, 2012 09:00 - 56 minutesTaylor Atkins' recent book is both an important contribution to East Asian Studies and an absolute delight to read. Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945(University of California Press, 2010) opens with a movie theater commercial in 2004 and closes with a metaphorical decapitation. In the intervening chapters Atkins develops a series of sophisticated and masterfully defended arguments about the ways that colonial Japan was transformed by its engagement with Korean...
Hank Glassman, “The Face of JizÅ: Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012)
May 10, 2012 14:11 - 56 minutesIn this episode, we talk with Prof. Hank Glassman who’s written a new book titled The Face of Jizo : Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press, 2012). Jizo is a Buddhist Bodhisattva whose presence has become ubiquitous throughout Japan as the protector of travelers, women,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Rowan K. Flad, "Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China" (Cambridge UP, 2011)
April 27, 2012 08:00 - 1 hourMany of us try to be thoughtful about the ways that we incorporate (or try, at least, to incorporate) different modes of evidence into our attempts to understand the past: objects, creatures, words, ideas. Rowan Flad's Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China: An Archaeological Investigation of Specialization in China's Three Gorges (Cambridge UP, 2011) stands as a beautiful case study of what it can look like to do so. Flad juxtaposes texts, bamboo slips, ceramic sherds, animal ...
Robert K. Fitts, “Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)
April 23, 2012 12:30 - 1 hourThere are three Americans in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. One is Horace Wilson, the professor of English who brought his students outside for a game in 1872, thus introducing baseball to Japan. Another is Wally Yonamine, the Hawaii-born Nisei who played professional baseball in Japan in the 1950s... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Laurence Monnais, C. Michele Thompson, and Ayo Wahlberg, “Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012)
March 26, 2012 12:50 - 1 hourSouthern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) gives me hope for the future of edited volumes. Not only is it a fascinating and coherent treatment of the history and practice of Vietnamese medicine, but it’s also a wonderfully interdisciplinary collection of approaches that... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eas...
Andrew Field, “Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954” (The Chinese University Press, 2010)
March 07, 2012 16:18 - 1 hour“To think of Shanghai is to think of its nightlife: the two are synonymous.” From here, Andrew Field takes us on a dance across modern Chinese history, through its nightscapes and ballrooms, into the sprawls of its settlements and the pages of its pictorials. Based on a wide range of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Timothy Brook, “The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties” (Harvard UP, 2010)
February 24, 2012 22:12 - 1 hourTim Brook‘s The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2010) rewards the reader on many levels. Though it provides an excellent introduction to Yuan and Ming history for both students and advanced scholars, it’s not merely a dry textbook: The... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Carol Benedict, “Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010” (University of California Press, 2011)
February 16, 2012 14:25 - 1 hourCarol Benedict‘s Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (University of California Press, 2011)is many things at the same time; among other things, it’s both an exceptionally rich account of an object (or set of objects) that were crucial to the history of China in the world, and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Erik Mueggler, “The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet” (University of California Press, 2011)
February 01, 2012 21:11 - 1 hourFirst things first: this is an outstanding book. In the course of The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (University of California Press, 2011), Erik Mueggler weaves together the stories of two botanists traveling through western China and Tibet in a lyrically-written... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Marta Hanson, “Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China” (Routledge, 2011)
January 24, 2012 20:28 - 1 hourMarta Hanson‘s book is a rich study of conceptions of space in medical thought and practice. Ranging from a deep history of the geographic imagination in China to an account of the SARS outbreak of the 21st century, Hanson’s book maps the transformations of medicine and healing in late imperial... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Dennis Frost, “Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan” (Harvard UP, 2011)
January 24, 2012 20:17 - 1 hourIn the celebrity firmament that circles around us, sports stars are among the brightest lights. Kobe, Tiger, Messi, Márta, Sachin, and Serena can be recognized from most points on the globe.But other stars are visible only in certain lands: Yuna Kim, Barbora Strycova, Sebastien Chabal, Andres Guardado, Israel Folau, Buster... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies