Indians have contributed to Kenya’s multiracial tapestry for centuries. At Independence, Indians constituted two percent of the population and formed its petty bourgeoisie. By 1968 Kenya hosted over 170,000 Indian residents. Occupying key roles in the economy and civil service, Indians played no small part in the twentieth-century history of Kenya. Yet, as Sana Aiyar…
Japanese Society and the Politics of the North Korean Threat is a fascinating and well-written study of populism and irrationality in Japan, reminiscent in many ways of Charles Mackay’s 19th-century Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds—illustrated here by the drivers behind the transformation in Tokyo’s attitude to Pyongyang between 1998, 2006 and on…
In the author’s preface to Flock of Brown Birds, Ge Fei writes of his response to those who have told him that they do not understand the work: “I don’t blame you. I’m not sure I understand it either.” Straightforward comprehension is, however, far from the point in this slight novella. Self-consciously inspired by the…
Reading and translating Taiwanese poet Ling Yu reminds me much of American writer, environmentalist, and activist Terry Tempest Williams’s wisdom: There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private. In my opinion, Ling Yu’s poetry contains the above qualities: perhaps aware of how…
The third volume in Christoph Baumer’s history of Central Asia is as accomplished as its predecessors The Age of the Steppe Warriors and The Age of the Silk Roads. The Age of Islam and the Mongols picks up, as they say, where we left off: it runs basically from the 8th-century Abbassids through the 15th-century’s…
A novel with a title like Pyre is unlikely to have a happy ending. Nevertheless, the journey towards this inevitable outcome delivers a disturbing insight into human bigotry and brutality whose application extends far beyond the novel’s treatment of inter-caste marriage in contemporary Tamil Nadu.
Journalist Paul Murphy spent a lot of time in Japanese courtrooms, as—one hastens to add—observer rather than defendant. These stories, vignettes really, are drawn from the 119 cases he followed in Matsumoto, a town of a quarter-million about 200km west of Tokyo.
If you turn to page 105 in this book you will see two extraordinary figures standing and facing each other in a colored albumen print from 1872. They both have bare feet; one wears a light-blue three-quarter length robe, rather like an elegant silk dressing-gown, and the other a similar one of a darker color, with…
Well-researched and devastatingly beautiful, Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing is an ambitious book that articulates the reverberating impact of totalitarianism in communist China, as well as the transforming power of friendship and humanity.
A frequent reader of the American foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs will feel right at home reading Kurt Campbell’s The Pivot. The author was the Obama administration’s principal architect of the US pivot or “rebalance” to Asia, and beyond the abundance of conventional wisdom, offers some important insights into the emergence of what many are…
One of the rewards of running a book review publication is the unexpected surprise that appears out of the blue. One of these is Filipina writer Catherine Torres’s recent collection Mariposa Gang and other stories. The ten stories in this slim volume—a mere 100 pages—are polished, accomplished and structurally sophisticated. Laconic, Torres can say a…
Hungry Bengal is the story of Bengal’s man-made famine in 1942 which killed two million people over a period of eighteen months to two years, all while Imperial Britain’s leaders in London looked on unconcerned. It was the British who provided both direct and indirect causes of the famine. When the War with Japan broke…
A rt has been central to China’s long history and to her core spiritual and intellectual values. However, much of that heritage has either been destroyed or it is now kept outside the country. Most of the onslaught has long been self-inflicted, deliberately aimed at China’s own cultural legacy, from the Tang dynasty’s iconoclastic reaction…