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Asian Review of Books

New Books Network

The Asian Review of Books is the only dedicated pan-Asian book review publication. Widely quoted, referenced, republished by leading publications in Asian and beyond and with an archive of more than two thousand book reviews, the ARB also features long-format essays by leading Asian writers and thinkers, excerpts from newly-published books and reviews of arts and culture. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

arts books

All Episodes

49:18

Rosemary Wakeman, "The Worlds of Victor Sassoon:...

Asian Review of Books ·

2025/02/06

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization–and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trader and industrialist. He’s the subject of Rosemary Wakeman’s latest book The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941 (U Chicago Press, 2024) which traces Victor’s journey through these three cities—and explores how the world economy changes as he travels.After all, it’s a period where the world trading system is beginning to

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56:04

Jorge Flores, "Empire of Contingency: How Portugal...

Asian Review of Books ·

2025/01/29

Portuguese India was tiny—a handful of trading posts and enclaves, centered on the colony of Goa. The Estado da Índia faced the Mughal Empire and the Deccan Sultanates, large Muslim and Persian-based societies that ruled the subcontinent.How did Portuguese India survive? Well, by spying. Jorge Flores in his book Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2024) explains how the Portuguese tried to learn more about their more powerful

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49:06

Avinash Paliwal, "India's Near East: A New History"...

Asian Review of Books ·

2025/01/23

After student protests toppled Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year, New Delhi and Dhaka have been at odds. Indian politicians complain about Hindus being mistreated in the Muslim-majority country; Bangladesh’s interim government fears that Hasina may launch a bid to return to power from India.It’s the latest development in what’s become an extremely complicated environment in what Avinash Paliwal calls “India’s Near East”: India, Bangladesh (or East Pakistan before the 1970s), and

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40:34

Glenn Diaz, "Yñiga: A Novel" (Ateneo de Manila UP, 2022)

Asian Review of Books ·

2025/01/16

Yniga, the main character of Glenn Diaz’s novel of the same name, returns to her unnamed fishing town after her urban neighborhood burns down in a fire–what many suspect is retaliation for the capture of a wanted army general near her house.What follows is a story about activist politics, state retaliation and returning home. Yñiga (Ateneo de Manila University Press: 2022) was the winner of the 2024 Philippine National Book Award for the Best Novel in English. It has also been picked up by Titled

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52:06

Peter Hessler, "Other Rivers: A Chinese Education"...

Asian Review of Books ·

2025/01/09

In 2019, journalist and writer Peter Hessler traveled with his family to China. He’d gotten a gig as a teacher of writing—nonfiction writing in particular—in what he’d hoped would be a sequel to his 2001 book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze.But plans changed—radically. At the very end of 2019, the COVID-19 virus emerges in Wuhan, leading to chaos as officials frantically try to figure out how to control the new disease. Peter’s reporting first wins his criticism from Chinese nationalists angry

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45:23

Victor D. Cha, "The Black Box: Demystifying the Study...

Asian Review of Books ·

2025/01/02

North Korea is, to this day, still one of the world’s most mysterious countries. What little we know about daily life in the country comes from defectors or foreigners who’ve spent time there–some of whom have been on this show. But both camps present narrow, if not slanted, views of what life is like in the country.Korea expert Victor Cha, along with several other researchers, have put together a collection that tries to tackle the topic of North Korea with a more rigorous approach, in The Black

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55:31

Juan José Rivas Moreno, "The Capital Market of Manila...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/12/26

Many authors have written about the Manila Galleons, the massive ships that took goods back and forth between Acapulco and Manila, ferrying silver one way, and Chinese-made goods the other.But how did the Galleons actually work? Who paid for them? How did buyers and sellers negotiate with each other? Who set the rules? Why on earth did the shippers decide to send just one galleon a year? Juan José Rivas Moreno dives into these questions in his book The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific

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48:00

Paul French, "Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/12/19

When defenders of the British royal family scrounged around for dirt on Wallis Simpson, the divorced U.S.-born fiancee of King Edward VIII, they often highlighted her year spent in China—often sharing scurrilous, and poorly-sourced–if not entirely unfounded–details of her time there.China historian Paul French tries to set the record straight with Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson (St. Martins: 2024). Simpson managed to have a jam-packed year, with time

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47:39

Herald van der Linde, "Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/12/12

Majapahit was Indonesia, and Southeast Asia’s, largest empire. Centered on the island of Java, Majapahit commanded loyalty from vassals across the archipelago: on Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, and even the Malay Peninsula, including a tiny village called Tumasik–known today as Singapore. The empire lasted for around 230 years, from its founding in 1292 to its fall to the Sultanate of Demak in 1527.Today, the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Majapahit is an important source of national pride in today’s

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47:14

Caroline Alexander, "Skies of Thunder: The Deadly...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/12/05

During the Second World War, FDR promised thousands of tons of US material to Chiang Kai Shek in order to keep China in the war and keep Japan distracted. But how would the US get it there? The only land route had been cut off by the Japanese invasion, leaving only one other option: air.For the next three years, US planes flew “The Hump”: an air route from Assam to Chongqing, over the dangerous Himalayan mountains and Burmese jungles. Countless planes were lost, whether on a Himalayan mountainside

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33:05

Vikas Swarup, "The Girl with the Seven Lives" (Simon...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/11/28

Vikas Swarup’s new novel, The Girl With the Seven Lives (Simon & Schuster India: 2024), opens with its main character Devi locked in a room, forced to retell her life’s story. Or, rather, her life’s stories–starting in the slums of Delhi, Devi reinvents herself time-and-time-again, with a new name and a new backstory, as she tries to carve a niche for herself in Indian society–only to be knocked back down, and be forced to start anew, with a new name.Vikas joins the show today to talk about his

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54:04

Allen James Fromherz, "The Center of the World: A...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/11/21

Whether it’s in commerce or conflict, today’s world pays rapt attention to the Persian Gulf. But the centrality of the Gulf to world history stretches far beyond the oil age–its ancient ports created the first proper trading system and the launching point for the spread of global Islam.Allen James Fromherz’s new book The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present (University of California Press, 2024) puts the Gulf at the center of a centuries-long

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33:45

Ruth Vanita, "A Slight Angle" (India Viking, 2024)

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/11/14

A Slight Angle (India Viking: 2024), the newest novel from Indian writer Ruth Vanita, is a story about love. Difficult love–her six characters are growing up in 1920s India, which takes a dim view of same-sex relationships, and those that transcend religious boundaries. Like Sharad, the jewelry designer who falls in love with his teacher, Abhik–only for the embarrassment to keep them apart for decades.Ruth Vanita is the author of many books, most recently The Broken Rainbow: Poems and

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63:50

John Duffus, "Backstage in Hong Kong: A Life with the...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/11/07

Today, the Hong Kong Philharmonic is one of the world’s great symphony orchestras. But when John Duffus landed in Hong Kong in 1979 as the Philharmonic’s general manager–its fifth in as many years–he quickly learned just how much work needed to be done to make a Western symphony orchestra work in a majority Chinese city.John Duffus’s memoir Backstage in Hong Kong: A Life with the Philharmonic, Broadway Musicals and Classical Superstars (Blacksmith: 2024) charts his life from running the

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42:24

Ronald Drabkin, "Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/10/31

Frederick Rutland—”Rutland of Jutland”—was a war hero, renowned World War I aviator…and a Japanese spy. In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Rutland shared information on U.S. aviation and naval developments to the Japanese, desperate for knowledge of U.S. capability.The funny thing was, as Ron Drabkin notes in his book Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor (William Morrow, 2024), that most people were pretty sure that the boisterous Rutland was

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77:46

Andrea Benvenuti, "Nehru's Bandung: Non-Alignment and...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/10/24

In 1955, the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries flock to the small city of Bandung, Indonesia, for the first-ever Afro-Asian conference. India and its prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru played a key role in organizing the conference, and Bandung is now seen as a part of Nehru’s push to create a non-Western foreign policy that aligned with neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union.But as Andrea Benvenuti’s Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy (Oxford

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50:13

William T. Taylor, "Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/10/17

Which society was the first to domesticate the horse? It’s a difficult question. The archaeological record is spotty, with only very recent advancements in genetics and carbon dating allowing scientists to really test centuries-old legends about where horses came from.For example, historians argued that the Botai civilization in Kazakhstan provided some of the earliest evidence of horse domestication–only for more recent studies to discover that the Botai domesticated an entirely different species

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45:58

Rohit Manchanda, "The Enclave: A Sharp and Hilarious...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/10/10

Maya, the protagonist of Rohit Manchanda’s novel The Enclave (Fourth Estate: 2024), should be happy with her life. She’s newly single, her net worth steadily rising in the booming India of the 2000s. She has a cushy, if slightly unfulfilling, job in academia. But she struggles: She wants to write, but can’t summon the energy to do so. She juggles several relationships, each one slowly imploding as the novel continues. And she butts heads with an oblivious and pompous bureaucrat, nicknamed “The

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44:14

Maaria Sayed, "From Pashas to Pokemon" (Vishwakarma...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/10/03

From Pashas to Pokemon (Vishwakarma Publications, 2024), Maaria Sayed’s first novel, is a coming-of-age story. Aisha grows up in the Muhammad Ali Road neighborhood of Mumbai in the Nineties–a time when India was starting to grapple with liberalization, globalization, and polarization. In Mumbai and London, Aisha tries to learn what it means to grow up, as an Indian, a daughter, a woman, and a Muslim.In this interview, Maaria and I talk about the Nineties, how filmmaking differs from writing a

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39:29

Kerry Brown, "The Great Reversal: Britain, China and...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/09/26

In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I tried to send several letters to her Chinese counterpart, the Wan Li Emperor. The letters tried to ask the Ming emperor to conduct trade relations with faraway England; none of the expeditions carrying the letters ever arrived.It’s an inauspicious beginning to the four centuries of foreign relations between China and what eventually became Britain, covered by Kerry Brown in his latest book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for

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