Historians are usually loath to ask “what if?”, but in The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire, Georgetown’s Mustafa Aksakal gets close.
Author: Peter Gordon
Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850 is the accompanying volume to an eponymous exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art which places painters, local and foreign, working in India and China in the context of the commercial and colonial operations of the East India Company.
The importance of archaeological developments can take a long time to register in the general public consciousness. This is perhaps because excavations take years, results are often published long after the work begins, the significance is not immediately apparent, or conclusions are denied when they run counter to conventional narratives. Keeladi, near Madurai, is a site discovered a decade ago; its significance was appreciated pretty quickly in Tamil Nadu, where it is located, but has rather flown under the radar internationally.
“The goal of this book”, writes Rian Thum in his introduction, “is to reach an understanding of Islamic Chinese history that makes the Muslims of China unsurprising, even ordinary.” The layman who has visited, say, Xi’an, might be surprised that this should be deemed necessary.
Due, one presumes, to the success of his first photo-album matching images of yesteryear with their current appearance, Macau-based photographer Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro has returned with an encore.
Back in the (pre-EU) day, the American Government and US corporations would place Greece into a Middle Eastern or Near Eastern department; I seem to recall my 1980s-era employer doing so, to the (mild) annoyance of its Greek distributor. Europe was more tightly-defined in those days.
V Vinicchayakul, the pen-name of Vinita Diteeyont, is prolific by any measure, reportedly with more than one hundred novels under her belt, many adapted for television and film. Only a very few have made it into English; had not she been championed by translator Lucy Srisuphapreeda, perhaps none would have been.
That translator Dong Li calls Chinese poet Ye Hui “metaphysical” in his introduction to The Ruins—a characterisation repeated in the book’s marketing material—might seem challenging, but in the fact the poems, while not exactly straightforward or immediately obvious, are—for most part—eminently accessible and interesting.
In an epilogue to his new book Assassins and Templars, Steve Tibble says (or, perhaps, protests) that his book really has nothing to do with the video game “Assassin’s Creed”, that any similarity is not so much coincidence as common intellectual and cultural ancestry. Readers of a certain generation might entertain some skepticism, especially in light of Tibble’s colloquial (albeit steadfastly rigorous) approach to the subject. Tibble might nevertheless have been aware of some pop-culture competition for reader mind-space, for he has written a page-turner of a history.
Expat memoirs, even (or perhaps especially) of the East Asian variety, are a venerable genre. One suspects that even in the early days, what authors presented as new and exotic, probably wasn’t really. In these days of ubiquitous travel videos on YouTube, this is probably even more the case. As a result, such books need a good raconteur or prose stylist to pass muster. Fortunately, Connla Stokes is both.
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