Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea by Sheila Miyoshi Jager [Book Review]
This year marks the 60th anniversary of, if not the end of the Korean War, at least the Armistice. That’s two generations. For almost anyone under the age of about thirty, the first-pass conventional view of the Korean War, if one thinks about it at all, is probably simple: North…
Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad by Melanie Kirkpatrick [Book Review]
For a state considered a charter member of the so-called “Axis of Evil”, North Korea never seems to remain the center of global attention for long. It is one of the places that the average person (or indeed, almost anyone) really knows nothing about: we don’t know how…
My Last Empress by Da Chen [Book Review]
Da Chen’s My Last Empress is a mixture of fable and reality, viewed through the imperfect perception of its characters rather than the crisp clear view of an omniscient narrator. While not perhaps the “hallucinatory realism” lauded by the Nobel Committee in their…
Winner Take All by Dambisa Moyo [Book Review]
The emergence of China as a major economic and political power is perhaps the most important development in the global system since the collapse of the Soviet Union. While this change is sometimes manifested through the launch of China’s first aircraft carrier,…
Through the Eyes of Tiger Cubs: Views of Asia’s Next Generation by Mark L. Clifford & Janet Pau [Book Review]
When trying to discern Asia’s future, perhaps the group whose viewpoints should be most sought after are those of Asia’s young. This is the group, after all, who be living that future. (I admit, in full disclosure, to being one…
The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Hagashino [Book Review]
The joy of reading detective fiction needn’t come from the crime—at least, not directly. The details of any crime, from the methods used by the criminal to his or her motivations, are often interchangeable between different detective stories. What an unsolved crime…
The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra by Roger Hart [Book Review]
“Tattered sandles.” This was the judgment of Xu Guangqi, the official collaborating with the Jesuit Matteo Ricci’s effort to bring Euclid’s Elements to China, on the state of contemporary Chinese mathematics. These sentiments were repeated by later academics and historians, who created…
Mission to China by Mary Laven [Book Review]
Narratives created to explain trends of national power often falter when tested against history. No sooner had the narrative of liberalism finally winning its long struggle against totalitarianism been postulated that the emergence of a successful yet authoritarian China started…
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher [Book Review]
At first, the idea that language affects the way we think seems plausible, if not obvious. Given that we often perceive people of different cultures to be thinking differently, and language is often coterminous with culture, one might be forgiven…
Recent Comments