I don’t review poetry. Well, until now. I’m breaking that commandment in posting this review of Scott Ezell’s outstanding poetry chapbook, The Front Lines of the War. The problem with reviewing poetry is I lack the knowledge and ability to appreciate and describe it, and I’m not a big fan of [...]
I’ve read nearly a hundred English-language works on the Ryukyus and Okinawa, and Night in the American Village is an easy pick for my top five books. It’s cleverly structured, well researched, informative yet highly readable, and, unusual for a book examining the issue of the American military presence on Okinawa, it [...]
This likeable novel opens on the island of Guam in the Marianas, where twenty-year-old Airman 2nd Class John Montez is stationed with the 19th Bomb Group, Far East Air Force. He’s angry with himself for not joining the Marines like many of his friends and relatives have. A tough fighting unit with [...]
With two excellent books on the history of baseball in Taiwan, is there need for another work on the subject? Not really, but Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895-1968 is a welcome addition. Like its predecessors, it’s an academic publication where questions of national identity take precedence [...]
During a Publisher Interview last year with Graham Earnshaw, the man behind Earnshaw Books, I asked which era he thought was most underrepresented in English-language books on China. The 1950s he said without a moment’s hesitation, and I have to agree. Since that conversation, he’s been doing his bit to [...]
Hong Kong is under siege. From property developers razing neighborhoods to build yet more skyscrapers. From the push-and-pull emanating from Beijing to demand greater subservience from this former British colony. Even without all that pressure, Hong Kong could very well collapse under the weight of its own population, permanent and [...]
In 1970, United States park ranger Alexander Weiss found writing on the walls. He was in the abandoned wooden barracks on Angel Island, a bit of rock in San Francisco Bay. Inside those barracks, Weiss found thousands of characters carved into the walls. Those characters were eventually determined to be [...]
Daniel Reid is a prolific writer on Chinese philosophy, medicine, and food. He lived in Taipei from 1973 to 1989, and by number of book titles – more than thirty – and copies sold, he is surely the most successful Taiwan expat writer of all time. His latest book, a [...]
Han Kang is a writer whose books are in conversation with each other. Themes and images migrate from one book to another. A line of dialogue that appears in one novel forms the basis of the next. Her books build on each other the way a nautilus creates its shell. [...]
Civil-Military Relations in Taiwan takes on the important subject of the relationship between the Republic of China armed forces and society, examining public perceptions of the military and the need for transformation to make it more relevant and effective. As author Dean Karalekas outlines, the military suffers from generally low morale, [...]