New Book Announcement: “In the Land of the Tian Shan Mountains” by Muhammad Idrees
Immerse yourself in an adventure to Kyrgyzstan seen through the eyes of a young Afghan.
New Book Announcement: “Taiwan in 100 Books”
Taiwan in 100 Books is an accessible introduction to the history and culture of Taiwan through one hundred English-language books.
New Book Announcement: “Pin Ups” by Yi Shun Lai
Pin Ups is a memoir about Yi Shun Lai’s long, ragged relationship with outdoor sports. Along the way, she discovers what it means to find a place for herself in the great outdoors—and what the act of carving out a place of her own taught her about tokenism, women’s leadership, and representation in a white…
New Book Announcement: “Quagmire in Civil War” by Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl
Our understanding of civil war is shot through with the spectre of quagmire, a situation that traps belligerents, compounding and entrenching war’s dangers. Despite the subject’s importance, its causes are obscure. A pervasive “folk” notion that quagmire is intrinsic to certain countries or wars has foreclosed inquiry, and scholarship has failed to identify quagmire as…
New Book Announcement: “The ‘Other’ Shangri-La: Journeys through the Sino-Tibetan frontier in Sichuan” by Shivaji Das
The ‘Other’ Shangri-La is a work of narrative non-fiction based on Shivaji Das and his wife’s journey through the Sino-Tibetan frontier land of western Sichuan. It describes the rugged landscape of this region that comprises 7,000-metre-high mountains, deep gorges, vast grasslands and the world’s most dangerous roads.
New Book Announcement: “Painter and Patron: The Maritime Silk Road in the Códice Casanatense” by Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales
Just around the corner from Rome’s Pantheon, on the Via di Sant’Ignazio, is the famed Biblioteca Casanatense. Among its precious books and manuscripts is an album of 76 striking watercolours made in Goa around 1540, the work of an anonymous Indian painter for an unknown Portuguese patron.
New Book Announcement: “The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing” by Si Nae Park
As the political, economic, and cultural center of Chosŏn Korea, eighteenth-century Seoul epitomized a society in flux: It was a bustling, worldly metropolis into which things and people from all over the country flowed. In this book, Si Nae Park examines how the culture of Chosŏn Seoul gave rise to a new vernacular narrative form…
New Book Announcement: “Longmen’s Stone Buddhas and Cultural Heritage: When Antiquity Met Modernity in China” by Wang Dong
This thoroughly researched book provides the first comprehensive history of how a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the Central China Plain, Longmen’s caves and the Buddhist statuary of Luoyang, was rediscovered in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
New Book Announcement: “Saving Sun Bears: One Man’s Quest to Save a Species” by Sarah Pye
In Asia, adult sun bears are poached for body parts which are thought to have medicinal properties. Many orphaned cubs, with their small size and endearing features, are kept illegally as pets. Malaysian ecologist Dr Wong Siew Te, or “papa bear”, has dedicated his life to saving the world’s smallest bear from extinction.
New Book Announcement: “Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China” by C Patterson Giersch
Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China’s north- and southwest. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography, access to resources, and recent political developments. In Corporate Conquests, C Patterson Giersch provides a desperately-needed challenge to these conventional understandings by tracing the disempowerment of minority communities to…
New Book Announcement: “The Rise and Fall of the Hang Seng Index” by Jake van der Kamp
“Every adult human being is an investment expert. Life is an investment exercise and you are your own best investment adviser.”
New Book Announcement: “Rated R Boy: Growing Up Korean in 1980s Queens” by Yongsoo Park
Rated R Boy: Growing Up Korean in 1980s Queens is a memoir of one family’s move from South Korea to the United States. Told by its child narrator, it describes life in mid-1970s Korea and compares it to life in America, where he is exposed to things that challenge what he’d held to be sacrosanct.
New Book Announcement: “Cherry Blossoms: Sakura Collections from the Library of Congress” by Mari Nakahara and Katherine Blood
Experience the splendor of the annual spring viewing of the nation’s sakura (cherry blossoms) with this stunning keepsake book. Original artwork, photographs, and objects from the Library of Congress collections illuminate the story of these landmark trees and how they came to the nation’s capital as a symbol of friendship with Japan.
New Book Announcement: “The United States of India: Anticolonial Literature and Transnational Refraction” by Manan Desai
The United States of India shows how Indian and American writers in the United States played a key role in the development of anticolonial thought in the years during and immediately following the First World War. For Indians Lajpat Rai and Dhan Gopal Mukerji, and Americans Agnes Smedley, WEB Du Bois, and Katherine Mayo, the…
New Book Announcement: “Geishas and the Floating World: Inside Tokyo’s Yoshiwara Pleasure District” by Stephen and Ethel Longstreet
Stephen and Ethel Longstreet bring the reader on an in-depth tour of the original and most infamous red-light district in Japan—the Yoshiwara district of old Tokyo.