Kishore Mahbubani, longtime Singaporean diplomat and academic, opens his new memoir with a provocative line: “Blame it on the damn British.” Kishore, who later served as Singapore’s ambassador to the UN and founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, was born to poor migrants in Singapore, studied philosophy on a government scholarship—and from there, somehow got roped into the foreign service.
In 1946, Kornel Chang’s Korean grandparents fled south from Pyongyang across the border at the 38th parallel, leaving the zone under Soviet military occupation for the one occupied by the US military. Years later, his family left South Korea for the United States. This book is born of conversations heard by Chang growing up in New York City.
Richard Overy’s Rain of Ruin is an epilogue of sorts to his epic global history of the Second World War from 2021, Blood And Ruins. This new work focuses on the final months of the war in Asia, something that has been a topic of other recent books, such as Mark Gallichio’s Unconditional (2020) and the early parts of Judgment at Tokyo by Gary Bass. Overy’s approach is to consider the air war, starting with the conventional bombing campaign against Japan’s cities, then moving on the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and finally looking at how this history contributed to Japan’s surrender.
The Northern Wei (386-534) are having a moment. Heritage projects, including large-scale digitization efforts, have brought renewed attention to Northern Wei sites of Buddhist statuary, including the Yungang and Longmen grottoes. The live-action Mulan movie thrust the iconic “Chinese” heroine, believed to originate in the multicultural milieux of the Northern Wei, back into the global spotlight. Ethnic tensions in China have heightened interest in the historical relations between Han and non-Han peoples, including the Taghbach, the Inner Asian people who founded the Northern Wei Dynasty.
Nicola Dinan presents a much-needed update on finding love in London as a 30-something in this follow-up to her brilliant 2023 debut novel, Bellies.
Quite a lot of archaeological water, to say nothing of history writing, has flowed under the bridge since Early Southeast Asia’s first edition in 2014.
Pakistan’s history since independence is… complicated. Partition wrecked the economy, leaving all the economic infrastructure in India. Democracy was weak, as the military launched multiple coups to overthrow the civilian government. The country was split into an unsustainable two halves—with one declaring independence as Bangladesh by the 70s.
Though Kavery Nambisan‘s new family saga Rising Sons skips across towns and cities before ending in the palatial bungalows of Central Delhi, its roots lie in a mostly dry village west of Mysore, where “mud is life.” This is the home of the Ai, the natives of the land before Hindus— bringing with them caste and idol worship—settled in the land.
In Praise of Floods is the final book by James C Scott, a renowned anthropologist and political scientist, published posthumously after he died in 2024. Much of Scott’s earlier work has focused on agrarian politics and acts of political resistance, this is a rather different book, focusing instead on the life history of a river, the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy).
Set in an unmarked pawnshop tucked behind a ramen restaurant, Filipino author Samantha Sotto Yambao’s Water Moon revolves around clients who pawn their choices—sometimes ones they don’t even remember making. What is life, after all, if not a series of choices? The very act of pawning a choice leaves a void; choices—it turns out—are fragments of the clients’ souls, used to fuel the lives of those on the other side of the pawnshop.
You must be logged in to post a comment.