Thirty years ago, just before the start of the first Gulf War between the United States and Iraq, Daniel Yergin’s The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power was released to widespread acclaim, and was later awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In that earlier book, Yergin explored the history of the oil industry and its impact on global geopolitics. The New Map is a worthy successor wherein Yergin updates and broadens his analysis of energy and geopolitics in the second decade of the 21st century.
Category Archive: Reviews
Buddhism would undergo profound changes as it was transmitted from its origins in India east into China, in the first century CE. Terminology had to be assimilated, for one thing. And when one language is translated and assimilated into another, it is inevitable that some conceptual connections will be lost and the meaning of ideas altered. Take Zen Buddhism. In his latest book, David Hinton says that we in the West are not just once-removed from the original Zen—but twice removed. This is because the Zen we know from Japan had already lost much of the original Daoist underpinnings of Chinese Zen—known as Chan—even before the religion traveled across the Pacific to America.
Indian Sun is a large book teeming with larger-than-life characters, not all of whom are called Ravi Shankar. Oliver Craske gives us a whole complex world, or, if you like, two complex worlds, Indian and Western, meeting, sometimes uneasily, through music.
Works of literature that feature the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian taiga are extremely rare; the only ones that immediately come to mind are The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian, about Evenki along the Heilongjiang-Russian border, and the (true) story of Dersu Uzala, a Nanai introduced to the world in Vladimir K Arsenyev’s now century-old Across the Ussuri Kray: Travels in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains.
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World boldly starts with a chapter entitled “The End” which opens with the death of the main protagonist. “Her name was Leila,” the novel begins, past tense, and already Leila, or Tequila Leila as she is known to her friends and clients, breathes no more, cliffhangers be damned.
These two new books from Shambhala’s excellent series Lives of the Masters introduce readers to the life and teachings of two great Buddhist innovators who lived many centuries apart, but who both contributed to the way future generations came to understand Buddhism.
Throughout history, expansionist powers have attempted to integrate newly conquered territories through the imposition of their own language, laws, and moral codes. These “civilizing missions” have been a defining feature of most imperial projects, whether motivated by religious fervor, to facilitate trade or simply an honest belief in the cultural superiority of one’s own culture.