A 2016 Associated Press article entitled “S Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of ‘vagrants’” told the English-speaking world about one of the biggest human rights abuses in modern South Korean history. In the 1980s, in the run-up to the Seoul Olympics, President Chun Doo-hwan’s dictatorship intensified a crackdown on “undesirables”, rounding them up and…
Vikramjit Ram’s novella Mansur re-imagines life amongst artists working in the imperial atelier of Mughal India. The emperor Jahangir had a deep interest in flora and fauna and dispatched agents far and wide to acquire exotic creatures that may delight him. It was the imperial painter, Mansur who was credited with capturing the sensitivity of…
Thirty years ago, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn published their first book, China Wakes, to critical acclaim. The couple wrote of their five years reporting about China for The New York Times from 1988 to 1993. Other journalists reporting on China have followed suit and we’ve seen books by Jan Wong, Mike Chinoy, Frank Langfitt,…
Even academic books need to be aware of the prevailing zeitgeist. Richard D McBride begins his history of first-millennium Korea with a pop-culture reference to K-Drama.
Tracy O’Neill was adopted from South Korea in the 1980s and never thought to search for her birth mother until 2020 when the world seemed to stop. She had just landed a tenure-track position at Vassar and had broken up with a long-term boyfriend. With more time on her hands—teaching online and not leaving her…
Long unavailable, Rohit Manchanda’s newly reissued A Speck of Coal Dust won the Betty Trask Award when it was first published (under a different titles) a generation ago. It takes place in the kingdom of childhood, not however to be confused with that of innocence. In this world, everything can be—and is meant to be—explored…
“Historians are stuck with the evidence, novelists can describe what actually happened,” says the French writer, Jean-Félix de la Ville Beaugé. In Firestorm in Paradise, historian Rana Safvi switches roles from the constraints of the former to the imagination of the latter. In her history of Mughal Delhi, Shahjahanabad, published in 2019, she meticulously retraces…
Hebrew is unique, an ancient tongue that was all but lost for millennia as a spoken language, but was revitalized in the late 19th century and is now the official language of Israel, a country of nine million. Despite this relatively small number of native speakers, Hebrew literature is robust, yet Hebrew literature in English…
Almost a hundred years ago, Agatha Christie published an Hercule Poirot mystery, Death in the Air, which takes place on a flight from Paris to London. It may not be her most famous, but debut author Ram Murali has recycled the title for his whodunnit set mainly in the foothills of the Himalayas near Rishikesh—where…
The title (and cover) of Andrew Hillier’s new book The Alcock Album: Scenes of China Consular Life 1843-1853 might lead one to think that it is primarily a collection of drawings and paintings; but while the volume is indeed profusely-illustrated, it is rather more a biography of Henrietta Alcock, the wife of Rutherford Alcock, one…
China is often seen by its peer economies as a problem. Yet, as far as climate change is concerned, Joanna Lewis writes in a new book, China has the potential to be part of the solution. Lewis, a distinguished professor at Georgetown University, highlights the importance of national bilateral cooperation with China in Cooperating for…
John Reeves was the British consul in neutral Macau throughout the Second World War. Officially, he reported to Chungking, but in fact he was on his own representing Britain in a very hostile environment. He was utterly unprepared.
Derek Chung is not only a prolific poet, novelist, and essayist, he’s also an acclaimed translator that has brought work from Li-Young Lee, Carl Sandburg, Williams Carlos Williams and others into Chinese. Now a new English translation of his poetry collection, A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist, from May Huang, brings back to…
We know a lot about Isfahan in the 17th century. Poets and court chroniclers praised its beauty and recorded its expansion under the great monarch, Shah Abbas (1588-1629). European travelers like John Chardin and Pietro della Valle left us picturesque descriptions of its monuments and people. Artists painstakingly recorded the city-scape. Scholars have long studied…
In mid-January 1945, US Navy pilots launched a series of attacks on Japanese-held Hong Kong. In his new book Target Hong Kong, Steven K Bailey, whose previous book Bold Venture told the story of the bombing of Hong Kong by US Army Air Corps pilots based in China under the command of General Claire Chennault…