What does Mongolia bring to mind? Maybe Genghis Khan. It’s in central Asia somewhere, isn’t it? Unless you’re a fan of sumo wrestling, that’s likely to be about the extent of your associations. Johan Nylander sets out to correct that, at least with respect to Mongolia’s economy, with his The Wolf Economy Awakens. It’s a cruise through Mongolia’s economic situation, and especially its economic future.
Author: Bill Purves
At last someone has found a practical application for virtual reality. Brian Kwok teaches design at Hong Kong’s Polytechnic University and he has been studying Hong Kong’s neon signs and the culture that surrounds them. It has convinced him that they should be preserved. But how? Kwok has a really difficult row to hoe, and he knows it full well.
Larry Feign, a professional visual artist who made his living as a cartoonist for many years. has written a rather unusual book. The Village at the Centre of the World has no cartoons, but the format is not dissimilar in that the work consists of a set of captioned photos, where the captions are essays of a few hundred words discussing the subject of the image.
In The Last Tigers of Hong Kong, John Saeki presents what might best be described as a chronological anthology of tiger sightings in Hong Kong from its earliest days as a colony right through to the present day.
Here is the most comprehensive account you are ever likely to find of the building of the western section of America’s transcontinental railway. Gordon Chang has certainly set himself a difficult task, as he seeks to document the daily life of the roughly 20,000 Chinese who contributed to building the Central Pacific section of American’s first transcontinental line in the late 1860s.
A tiger hunt! In No Beast so Fierce, Dane Huckelbridge tells the exciting true story of the extirpation of a man-eating tiger in colonial India in 1907. This was no safari with a fleet of elephants and an army of bearers. It was one Irishman with a rifle and three cartridges on foot against a tiger that had killed and eaten about 440 persons over a span of about a decade. The numbers are inexact because deaths of rural women collecting firewood weren’t carefully recorded in those years.
Academic integrity sometimes requires revising theoretical perspectives as a situation changes and new evidence comes to light. Mobo Gao, a professor of Asian Studies at the University of Adelaide, finds himself in that position. In 1998 he wrote Gao Village, an anthropological study of life in a very poor Chinese village during the latter half of the 20th century. He was thoroughly qualified to do so, because he was born and raised there in abject poverty. He frankly recounts how qualifying for a university education from such a background, in addition to intellectual gifts, required a combination of luck, guanxi and a bit of cheating.