On June 1, 2024, my literary friend Bradley Winterton passed away at the age of 86 at his home in Saigon. Before his passing, I had been working on his book Moments of Vision: Views and Reviews from East Asia. In fact, just three days before his death, he wrote [...]
In my review of Simon Rowe’s Pearl City: Stories from Japan and Elsewhere (2020), I wrote of the titular “Pearl City” chapter: “It’s a very satisfying story but one that leaves you wanting a full novel. We want to ride with Ms. Suzuki again.” And that’s exactly what we get [...]
The book is surely man’s greatest invention. Sometimes, though, there’s a faulty leap in logic equating the civilizational glory of printed text with the arrival of Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press circa 1440. That’s a Eurocentric and modernity-skewed way of looking at things. Over the last two millennia, it is [...]
Bridging East & West is a fast-paced and fun account of Kathie Wei-Sender’s long, fascinating life, from childhood dangers during the Sino-Japanese War to an arranged marriage and move to the United States, to a career in nursing and then a reinvention as bridge champion mixing with world political leaders. [...]
Jen Paolini speaks with author John Saeki and reviews his The Last Tigers of Hong Kong. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Hong Kong stood as the backdrop to a spate of urban developments, transforming from “a barren rock” to a desirable port city in a matter of decades. [...]
This engrossing novel of expat life in Taipei in the late 1950s is a story which stays with you. That’s due, in part, to the interesting, believable characters, but also because the ending leaves a few threads untied. The minor mystery of the “Narcissus” in the title is easily enough [...]
Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges – long-time China watchers and prolific authors – seek to lay out the facts about Xi Jinping without prejudice and bombast. And they succeed. Some might say the subtitle itself, “The Most Powerful Man in the World,” is bombastic. It’s not. It happens to be [...]
Taiwan’s greatest sports story occurred during the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945). The Kano baseball team, a ragtag band of players from a two-bit school in a backwater city, defied the odds to reach the final of the 1931 Koshien High School Baseball Tournament in Osaka. The team came from a [...]
It’s been sad watching the decline in popularity of the travelogue over the last quarter century. I remain hopeful, however, that there can be a renaissance of the genre, because a good travel book is an inherently wonderful blend of fun and fact. This satisfying mix of escapist pleasure and [...]
Aaron Friedberg would be justified in adopting an “I told you so,” attitude to the West’s belated waking up to its failed engagement project with China. In articles and books such as Contest for Supremacy (2011), the American political scientist has long warned about the China threat. However, in Getting [...]