When Clarissa FitzRoy arrives on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island in October 1836, the heiress is met with the salty spray of the ocean.
Cross-border Intimacies is a powerful account of the experiences of migrant women and their families between China and Taiwan. Since the early 1990s, economic exchanges between the two countries have paved the way to migration and sociocultural interaction across a previously closed border.
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.
When Bitcoin first became a buzzword among early adopters around 2011, it was spoken of by devotees as a revolutionary force, promising to upend finance much like Jimi Hendrix redefined rock music with his electric guitar riffs. But for ‘normies’ or everyday people, the idea was baffling. How could something intangible, not backed by governments or banks, hold real value? In The Devil Takes Bitcoin: Cryptocurrency Crimes and the Japanese Connection, Jake Adelstein unpacks this world with a gripping narrative that blends true crime, investigative journalism, and cultural insight.
Although Razia Sajjad Zaheer’s collection Darkness and Other Stories was written following India’s partition in 1947, it simmers with relevance today. Women still confront misogyny and sexism. They continue to be judged for their choices—sometimes by their own kind—and must often accept a lower social status.
Where does Greece belong? Many look at the ancient Greek ruins of Athens, and see the cradle of Western civilization. But much of Greece’s history actually looks eastward to the rest of the Mediterranean: to Turkey, Egypt, Israel and Palestine. In his book The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East, Sean Mathews argues that it’s best to think about Greece as belonging to the “Near East”—and doubly so with today’s more complicated geopolitics.
Edmund Burke remarked in 1790 that “… which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation… The reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions.” The course of the French Revolution soon proved him right. Two Paths to Prosperity reaffirms Burke’s insight on an even grander stage. Avner Greif, Guido Tabellini and Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr bring contemporary social science to bear on the key junctures in European and Chinese history. Along the way, they explore the most fundamental causes of growth, freedom, and innovation that led to the Industrial Revolution and still matter today.
Our Madhopur Home is a multigenerational family saga narrated through an unusual and carefully balanced set of perspectives, most strikingly that of Laura, the family’s Labrador who observes: “this is not just my tale but also a narrative of bonds and relationships on a broad canvas,” and that the story of the Madhopur home is “not just the tale of a single house but a reflection of all of society.”
“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.
On 9 August 1965, Singapore was expelled from Malaysia, which had itself only become an independent country two years earlier. But Malaysia insisted that Malaysian troops be permitted to remain in Singapore. Singapore’s future Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew later said that Malaysia’s insistence “stiffened our resolve” to “build up the Singapore Armed Forces”. The person primarily responsible for doing that is the subject of Ramachandran Menon’s new book Kirpa Ram Vij: The Volunteer Who Launched an Army.
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