Elizabeth Economy’s The World According to China joins an overcrowded bookshelf. But it’s a welcome addition, its breadth of coverage and insights into China’s push to attain global dominance making the book a must-read for journalists, business leaders, policymakers, and the interested general reader. The title is a little misleading – [...]
Laid low by a mystery ailment and sleepless nights, I was struggling to get through my to-do list, top of which this sat Larry Feign’s pirate saga The Flower Boat Girl. Oh well, if Robert Louis Stevenson could write Treasure Island while bedridden, then I could at least read and review [...]
Reviewed by Frank Beyer. This novel details the life of Isham Cook, pen name of an American writer who has lived in Beijing for many years. It isn’t a straightforward read; Lust & Philosophy follows Isham through a number of coming of age experiences in different countries and they’re not in [...]
A Small Band of Men is a highly entertaining memoir of life in Hong Kong’s Marine Police from 1977 up to the 1997 handover. I find books which give you a close-up look at a profession of great interest; they’re educational, grounded in reality, and a welcome change from introspective novels [...]
I was recently working on a book chapter about Western authors who had lived in pre-communist Peking – the likes of Edmund Backhouse, George Kates, Harold Acton, David Kidd – and I was struggling to come up with an interesting frame. Rather than a straightforward series of chronological biographies, I [...]
All Flowers Bloom, written by Kawika Guillermo and published by Westphalia Press, is a book that is difficult to define, let alone review. It is ostensibly a novel, classified as queer speculative fiction, but there is not exactly a plot to follow. At least, there is not just one plot [...]
Even among the rich cast of China’s expat irregulars, Isham Cook stands out for his idiosyncrasy. Thankfully, it’s the eccentricity of the intelligent iconoclast, and his often incendiary writing has both substance and style. Cook is a libertarian – of the drugs and sexual freedom bent rather than the guns [...]
When it comes to travel writing, China’s immense size can be overwhelming. Solutions include focusing on a small town and its hinterland, or – at the other extreme – covering every province. A good compromise is taking a transect across the country, whether that thread be a river, a highway, [...]
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 [...]
You feel a certain amount of pressure to be emotionally moved when visiting Nagasaki’s most important atomic bomb sites such as the Peace Park, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, and the Atomic Bomb Hypocentre Park (the spot above which the "Fat Man" bomb detonated at 11:02 on August 9, 1945). If [...]