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 [...]
It would take a cold heart not to fall in love with this book from its very opening pages, where in evocative yet never overcooked prose veteran Japan writer Amy Chavez describes the daily rhythms of island life in the coming and going of fishing boats and ferries as seen [...]
The United States vs. China: The Quest for Global Economic is a sober, sensible warning about the potential dangers of various possible futures that lie ahead as China matches the United States in economic might and overtakes it in the coming decades. The China challenge will be different from the [...]
The plainspeople from China brought the legal notion of land title. Well, my father often jokes, “It used to be that if a Paiwan person had walked through a place leaving footprints with his own two feet enough times, that place belonged to him.” Precious little literature from Taiwan’s Indigenous [...]
Is the English-language bookshelf already too full of novels set in pre-WW2 China? Has that rich seam of Shanghai ore not been thoroughly exhausted? And on a broader note, is it time to move on from the Second World War? No, no, and thrice no. Shanghai was by population count [...]
“No poetry or memoirs,” warn some publishers in their submission guidelines. To be paired with poetry – yes, cruel, but the truth is often cruel. The fact is that the general reading public is not interested in non-celebrity memoirs, and the number of sales (or copies given away) is usually [...]
American schoolchildren are taught that the night in 1775 when the famous patriot Paul Revere waited for the signal to inform him whether the invading British were coming by land or by sea, he was told to watch for a lantern that would be hung in the steeple of Boston’s [...]
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 – [...]
This illustrated book of Japan’s most famous pilgrimage, which connects 88 temples associated with the Buddhist monk Kobo Daishi (774–835), is like a serene stroll around a beautiful Japanese garden, and one in the company of a genial host. John Lander's images are – as befits the subject manner – [...]