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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

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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51:29

Steven K. Bailey, "Target Hong Kong: A True Story of...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/09/19

On January 16, 1945, dozens of U.S. Navy aircraft took off for China’s southern coast, including the occupied British colony of Hong Kong. It was part of Operation Gratitude, an exercise to target airfields, ports, and convoys throughout the South China Sea. U.S. pilots bombed targets in Hong Kong and, controversially, in neutral Macau as they strove to cut off Japan’s supply chains. They encountered fierce resistance: Japan said it shot down ten planes, four pilots were captured.The Jan. 16 raids

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50:15

Peter Rose, "The Good War of Consul Reeves"...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/09/12

Macau was supposed to be a sleepy post for John Reeves, the British consul for the Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast. He arrived, alone, in June 1941, his wife and daughter left behind in China. Seven months later, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, invaded Hong Kong, and made Reeves the last remaining British diplomat for hundreds of miles, responsible for refugees streaming in from China. Peter Rose uses Reeves as a jumping off point for his newest work of historical fiction, The Good War of

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47:25

David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/09/05

After reading David Chaffetz’s newest book, you’d think that the horse–not oil–has been humanity’s most important strategic commodity. As David writes in his book Raiders, Rulers and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires (Norton, 2024), societies in Central Asia grew powerful on the backs of strong herds of horses, giving them a military and an economic advantage against their horse-less neighbors. Persia, India and China all burned cash trying to sustain their own herds of horses–-with little

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37:10

Marga Ortigas, "God's Ashes: Apocrypha" (Penguin, 2024)

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/08/29

Climate change. The refugee crisis. The rise of social media.These big social questions—and others—inspired journalist Marga Ortigas in the creation of her new novel God’s Ashes (Penguin Southeast Asia, 2024) , a piece of speculative fiction set in a very different 2023. A transnational crime unites the book’s characters, rich and poor, on a journey throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, all coming together in a book that investigates human connection, the plight of stateless people,

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46:05

Rachel Kousser, "Alexander at the End of the World:...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/08/22

In 330 BC, Alexander the Great conquers the city of Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire. His troops later burn it to the ground, capping centuries of tensions between the Hellenistic Greeks and Macedonians and the Persians.That event kicks off Rachel Kousser’s book Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great (Mariner Books, 2024), which tells the story of how Alexander—the unbeaten military genius and the most powerful man in that part of

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41:00

Juli Min, "Shanghailanders" (Spiegel & Grau, 2024)

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/08/14

Shanghailanders (Spiegel & Grau: 2024), the debut novel from Juli Min, starts at the end: Leo, a wealthy Shanghai businessman, sees his wife and daughters off at the airport as they travel to Boston. Everyone, it seems, is unhappy.The novel then travels backwards through time, giving answers to questions revealed in later chapters, jumping from person to person: Leo, Eko, their daughters Yumi, Yoko and Kiko, and other peripheral members of the household, as we come to learn

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55:16

Lio Mangubat, "Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/08/08

Baseball’s introduction to the Philippines. The slot machine trade between Manila and Shanghai. A musical based extremely loosely on the life of the sultan of Sulu.These are just a few of the historical topics from Lio Mangubat’s Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period (Faction Press: 2024), a collection of 13 essays on stories from Filipino history as a Spanish and then American colony. All the stories come from Lio’s podcast, The Colonial Department, which

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54:31

Roger Crowley, "Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/08/01

The spice islands: Specks of land in the Indonesian archipelago that were the exclusive home of cloves, commodities once worth their weight in gold. The Portuguese got there first, persuading the Spanish to fund expeditions trying to go the other direction, sailing westward across the Atlantic.Roger Crowley, in his new book Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World (Yale University Press: 2024) covers six decades of exploration, conflict and conquest, starting from the Portuguese

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46:08

Dan Morrison, "The Poisoner of Bengal: The 1930s...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/07/25

It’s the 1930s. Amarendra Chandra Pandey, the youngest son of an Indian prince, is about to board a train when a man bumps into him. Amarendra feels a prick; he then boards the train, worried about what it portends.Just over a week later, Amarendra is dead—of plague. India had not had a case of plague in a dozen years: Was Amarendra’s death natural, or premeditated—perhaps orchestrated by Benoy, his half-brother and competitor for the family riches? The case is the subject of Dan Morrison’s

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52:09

Bill Lascher, "A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/07/18

Melville Jacoby was a U.S. war correspondent during the Sino-Japanese War and, later, the Second World War, writing about the Japanese advances from Chongqing, Hanoi, and Manila.He was also a relative of Bill Lascher, a journalist–specifically, the cousin of Bill’s grandmother. Bill has now collected Mel’s work in a book: A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War (Blacksmith Books: 2024), with photos detailing Mel’s early days as an exchange student in China, then his later

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68:52

Eric Thompson, "The Story of Southeast Asia" (NUS...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/07/11

Does Southeast Asia “exist”? It’s a real question: Southeast Asia is a geographic region encompassing many different cultures, religions, political styles, historical experiences, and languages, economies. Can we think of this part of the world as one cohesive “place”?Eric Thompson, in his book The Story of Southeast Asia (NUS Press: 2024), suggests that we can, as he tells the region’s history from way back in prehistory, through its time as Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms, the introduction of Islam

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45:41

Michelle T. King, "Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei...

Asian Review of Books ·

2024/07/04

In 1971, the New York Times called the Taiwanese-Chinese chef, Fu Pei-Mei, the “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.”But, as Michelle T. King notes in her book Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (Norton, 2024), the inverse–that Julia Child was the Fu Pei-Mei of French cuisine–might be more appropriate. Fu spent decades on Taiwanese television, wrote three seminal cookbooks on Chinese cuisine, ran a famous cooking academy and even provided important culinary advice

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