As current events in Palestine, Iraq, and the Red Sea attest, the Middle East is a region with much unrest, instability and conflict. However, the region is undergoing a new era of turmoil and transition, headlined by Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich Gulf States. As a journalist and author with decades of experience in covering geopolitics around the world, Robert D Kaplan sheds some light on this transition in a sweeping and insightful overview of the Muslim world from Egypt to Iran to Central Asia, which he terms the Greater Middle East.
It’s perhaps one of history’s funny accidents that relations between the U.S. and Russia were changed not by one, but two, George Kennans. Decades before George F. Kennan wrote his famous Long Telegram that set the tone for the Cold War, his predecessor was exploring Russia’s Far East on a quest to investigate the then-Russian Empire’s practice of exiling political prisoners to Siberia.
In an interview with Pierre Andre Boutang in 1989, Satyajit Ray, the Academy Award winning director, declared that India has “a fairly backward audience” adding that this “unsophisticated audience” is largely “exposed to the commercial Hindi cinema, more than anything else.” In Rays’ account, the exposure to commercial Hindi cinema is the cause of Indian audiences’ lack of sophistication.
Looking back, 1976 was the most tumultuous year in modern Chinese history. Zhou Enlai died in January, Zhu De in early July, and Mao in September. The three main founders of the PRC were gone, unleashing a new era. And in late July that year, Tangshan in Hebei province suffered the worst earthquake in China’s recorded history with a conservative death toll of 242,000. Another 164,000 were injured and over 4000 children were left orphans overnight.
First looks at China, or some aspect of it, at least those that have impinged on the broader consciousness, have often been travelogues. Think Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze or Tim Clissold’s Mr China. Over the years, these books have covered expats, farmers, millennials, businessmen, but despite China’s ever deeper involvement with Africa—one of the more important contemporary geopolitical developments—there has been little, at least in extended book form, written on Africans living and working in China. Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Black Ghosts may be the first, certainly one of the first, at least as something other than an academic study.
Who are the Bene Israel Jews of India? Where did they come from? How did they survive in India? Sweet Malida is a moving, multi-layered, richly sensory and informative collection of poems and short prose inspired by this ancient community to which the poet herself belongs.
It’s the Australian Mystery Writers’ Festival and debut author Ernest Cunningham is one of the participating writers. Cunningham arrives at the festival—hosted on the Ghan, the famous train that goes from Darwin to Adelaide—following the publication of his memoir Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (also, the title of author Benjamin Stevenson’s novel that first introduces Cunningham) and is, having signed a six-figure advance, now stuck trying to find an idea for a novel.
Kashmir has always been the point of connection between South Asia, Central Asia and Xinjiang. Winding their way through the mighty Himalaya, Pamir and Karakoram Mountain ranges, traders, travelers and officials created a series of close historic economic, cultural and political ties that have bound the region together.
The East India Company was a unique entity in world history: More than just a commercial enterprise, the Company tried to act as its own government. Not many at the time–whether legislators or company officials in London, and certainly not Indian people—though this was a great idea.
Nestled among tea farms, the houses of Uchida Road have cradled generations. At the end of the lane, Chie Uchida lives in an old farmhouse with her parents and brother. The meaning of her given name, A Thousand Graces, is the novel’s title. Set in Japan in the 1970s, traditions abound, and gender roles and societal expectations loom large, setting the stage for Chie’s struggle to find her place in the world as she comes of age.
You must be logged in to post a comment.