That use of first-person plurals in the title of Early Indians: The Story Of Our Ancestors And Where We Came From should not put non-Indians off. Tony Joseph has, based on and catalyzed by the most recent genetic research, written a clear, readable and, for those unfamiliar with the subject, fascinating history of Indians as a people. It will also serve both as a primer to the way the ability to read the human genome is revolutionizing archaeology as well as a salutary alternative to the eurocentric perspective of many if not most treatments of early human history.
Christians have Jesus, the Jews the Messiah, Muslims the Mahdi, and Buddhists Maitreya. All these names are applied to someone who will, at some time, appear on earth as a representative, regent or successor of the principal object of religious veneration.
The ARB reviewer of Volume 1 of Old Hong Kong Photos and the Tales They Tell wrote “Let’s hope the next one comes out soon.” As requested, Volume 2 is now available, with a new selection from David Bellis’s collection of old Hong Kong photos.
In 1931, a time of economic and social turmoil in America, The Epic of America by the historian John Truslow Adams was published. In it, Adams coined the term “American Dream”, which embodied for him the differences between the old and new worlds of Europe and America.
Book reviews on Indian fiction and non-fiction from 2018, covering history, literature, sociology, art, culture and international relations.
Western complaints about Chinese-manufactured copies are nothing new. In 1801, a certain Captain John E Swords approached Gilbert Stuart to purchase a copy of the painter’s famous portrait of George Washington. Stuart, who had burned before, extracted a promise from Swords as a condition of the sale that he would have no further copies executed.
“This book,” starts the introduction, “was written by a man who did not exist. Despite this obvious handicap, Alfred Raquez was extraordinarily prolific.” Raquez was in fact a man on the lam: his real name Joseph Gervais, a lawyer from Lille, who got into a spot of bother—fraud, it seems—and decamped to the Orient, as it was then called, to avoid arrest and prosecution.
The great British geopolitical theorist Halford Mackinder wrote that great statesmanship requires “geographical capacity” and “an insight into the minds of other nations.” He explained geographical capacity as a “mind which flits easily over the globe, which thinks in terms of the map, which quickly clothes the map with meaning, which correctly and intuitively places the commercial, historical, or political drama on its stage.”
Macau’s 2019 was ushered in by a New Year’s Eve concert headlined by Chinese soprano He Hui who sang selections from Italian composers Puccini, Verdi, Catalani and Cilèa.
Our reviews of Chinese fiction—novels and short story collections—in translation this year.
You must be logged in to post a comment.