Shows / Asian Review of Books
Asian Review of Books
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
Episodes
- Asian Review of Books
Sam Dalrymple, "Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia" (William Collins, 2025)
Partition—the rapid, uncoordinated, and bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War—remains the central event of South Asian history…
- Asian Review of Books
Tracy Slater, "Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp" (Chicago Review Press, 2025)
On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced Executive Order 9066, which authorized the confinement of tens of thousands of Japanese and…
- Asian Review of Books
Nan Z. Da, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton UP, 2025)
I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors writing in…
- Asian Review of Books
Audrey Truschke, "India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent" (Princeton UP, 2025)
I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors writing in…
- Asian Review of Books
Eiko Maruko Siniawer, "Ten Moments that Shaped Tokyo" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
How did Tokyo—Japan’s capital, global city, tourist hotspot and financial center—get to where it is today? Tokyo–or then, Edo–had a rather unglamorous start…
- Asian Review of Books
Aatish Taseer, "A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile" (Catapult, 2025)
In 2019, famed journalist and writer Aatish Taseer was thrown out of India. Soon after he wrote a cover article for Time calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi…
- Asian Review of Books
Sanjena Sathian, "Goddess Complex" (Penguin Press, 2025)
Sanjana Satyananda, the main character of Sanjena Sathian’s novel, Goddess Complex (Penguin Press, 2025), is a bit of a mess. She’s back in the States after a…
- Asian Review of Books
James D.J. Brown, "Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge" (Hurst, 2025),
The Russians came late to Japan, arriving after the Portuguese and other European powers. But as soon as they arrived, Russia tried to use spies and espionage…
- Asian Review of Books
Paul French, "Destination Macao" (Blacksmith Books, 2024)
Macau–onetime Portuguese colony, now casino hotspot–has long captured the imaginations of travelers, reporters, artists and writers. The city served as the…
- Asian Review of Books
Zev Handel, "Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese" (U Washington Press, 2025)
For centuries, scribes across East Asia used Chinese characters to write things down–even in languages based on very different foundations than Chinese. In…
- Asian Review of Books
Naomi Xu Elegant, "Gingko Season: A Novel" (W. W. Norton, 2025)
Naomi Xu Elegant’s debut novel, Gingko Season (W. W. Norton: 2025), stars Penelope Lin, a young Chinese woman living in New York in the faraway year of 2018…
- Asian Review of Books
John Man, "Conquering the North: China, Russia, Mongolia: 2,000 Years of Conflict" (Oneworld Publications, 2025)
China, famously, built the Great Wall to defend against nomadic groups from the Eurasian steppe. For two millennia, China interacted with groups from the…
- Asian Review of Books
Fyodor Tertitskiy, "Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung" (Hurst UP, 2025)
The Kims, of North Korea, are perhaps the 21st century’s most successful family dictatorship–if only due to sheer longevity, having run North Korea for the…
- Asian Review of Books
Vappala Balachandran, "India and China at Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History" (Hurst, 2025)
China and India have had a tense relationship, disagreeing over territory, support for each other’s rivals, and even, at times, leadership of the “Global…
- Asian Review of Books
Chris Aslan, "Unravelling the Silk Road: Travels and Textiles in Central Asia" (Icon Books, 2024)
The Silk Road may be the most famous trade network in history. But the flow of silk from China to the Middle East and Europe isn’t the only textile trade…
- Asian Review of Books
Lizhi Liu, "From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Alibaba. Tencent. JD. Pinduoduo. Run down the list of China’s most valuable companies and you’ll find, for the most part, that they’re all e-commerce…
- Asian Review of Books
Mayukh Sen, "Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star" (Norton, 2025)
In 2022, Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian actress to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. But she wasn’t the first actress of Asian origin to be…
- Asian Review of Books
Laura Spinney, "Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
English. French. Italian. Hindi. Greek. Russian. All these different languages can trace their roots to the same origin: Proto-Indo-European, spoken in 4000 BC…
- Asian Review of Books
Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, "The Great Transformation: China's Road from Revolution to Reform" (Yale UP, 2024)
In 1968, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, asserting his control of China 15 years later, Deng Xiaoping launched the reform and opening up period…
- Asian Review of Books
Chris Stowers, "Shoot, Ask...and Run" (Earnshaw Books Ltd, 2025)
Chris Stowers, longtime photographer, credits a fellow journalist for the title of his latest memoir, Shoot, Ask...and Run (Earnshaw, 2025). The journalist’s…
- Asian Review of Books
Richard Overy, "Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan" (Norton, 2025)
September 2 will mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender to the United States aboard the USS. Missouri, ending the Second World War. The U.S…
- Asian Review of Books
Bin Yang, "Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Chinese travelers first made their way to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean in the 14th century, looking for goods like coconuts, cowries, and ambergris. That…
- Asian Review of Books
Kornel Chang, "A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under U.S. Occupation" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for U.S. troops to arrive, which started almost three years of…
- Asian Review of Books
Robert J. Antony, "Outlaws of the Sea: Maritime Piracy in Modern China" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)
Did you know Hong Kong used to be a hub for pirates? That factoid has long been part of the popular history for Hong Kong—and for Southern China broadly. For…
- Asian Review of Books
Ashis Ray, "The Trial That Shook Britain: How a Court Martial Hastened Acceptance of Indian Independence" (Routledge India, 2024)
In 1945 to 1946, postwar India was enthralled by the treason trial of three officers—formerly of the Indian National Army, who fought against the British in…
- Asian Review of Books
The Dead Sea: A 10,000 Year History
Geographic labels are sometimes misnomers. The Dead Sea’s name is not, for the most part. Its high salinity levels kill most forms of life, barring a couple…
- Asian Review of Books
Manu Pillai, "Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity" (Allen Lane, 2025)
What is Hinduism? For centuries, that question was particularly thorny, both for local Indians and for colonial outsiders. People inside and outside the…
- Asian Review of Books
Kishore Mahbubani, "Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir" (Public Affairs, 2024)
Kishore Mahbubani, longtime Singaporean diplomat and academic, opens his new memoir with a provocative line: “Blame it on the damn British.” Kishore, who later…
- Asian Review of Books
Tahir Kamran, "Chequered Past, Uncertain Future: The History of Pakistan" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
Pakistan’s history since independence is…complicated. Partition wrecked the economy, leaving all the economic infrastructure in India. Democracy was weak, as…
- Asian Review of Books
Bertil Lintner, "The Golden Land Ablaze: Coups, Insurgents and the State in Myanmar" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Four years ago, on Feb. 1 2021, the Burmese military overthrew the fledgling democratic government in the Southeast Asian country of Burma, officially known as…
- Asian Review of Books
Rosemary Wakeman, "The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization–and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trader and…
- Asian Review of Books
Jorge Flores, "Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Avinash Paliwal, "India's Near East: A New History" (Oxford UP, 2024)
After student protests toppled Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year, New Delhi and Dhaka have been at odds. Indian politicians complain about…
- Asian Review of Books
Glenn Diaz, "Yñiga: A Novel" (Ateneo de Manila UP, 2022)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Peter Hessler, "Other Rivers: A Chinese Education" (Penguin, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Victor D. Cha, "The Black Box: Demystifying the Study of Korean Unification and North Korea" (Columbia UP, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Juan José Rivas Moreno, "The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Paul French, "Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Herald van der Linde, "Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia's Greatest Empire" (Monsoon Books, 2024)
Majapahit was Indonesia, and Southeast Asia’s, largest empire. Centered on the island of Java, Majapahit commanded loyalty from vassals across the archipelago…
- Asian Review of Books
Caroline Alexander, "Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World" (Viking, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Vikas Swarup, "The Girl with the Seven Lives" (Simon & Schuster India, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Allen James Fromherz, "The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present" (U California Press, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Ruth Vanita, "A Slight Angle" (India Viking, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
John Duffus, "Backstage in Hong Kong: A Life with the Philharmonic, Broadway Musicals and Classical Superstars" (Blacksmith Books, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Ronald Drabkin, "Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor" (William Morrow, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Andrea Benvenuti, "Nehru's Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
William T. Taylor, "Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History" (U California Press, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Rohit Manchanda, "The Enclave: A Sharp and Hilarious Portrait of Womanhood in India" (Fourth Estate, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Maaria Sayed, "From Pashas to Pokemon" (Vishwakarma Publications, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Steven K. Bailey, "Target Hong Kong: A True Story of U.S. Navy Pilots at War" (Osprey, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Peter Rose, "The Good War of Consul Reeves" (Blacksmith Books, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires" (Norton, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Marga Ortigas, "God's Ashes: Apocrypha" (Penguin, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Rachel Kousser, "Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great" (Mariner Books, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Juli Min, "Shanghailanders" (Spiegel & Grau, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Lio Mangubat, "Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period, 1565-1946" (Faction Press, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Roger Crowley, "Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World" (Yale UP, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Dan Morrison, "The Poisoner of Bengal: The 1930s Murder That Shocked the World" (Juggernaut, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Bill Lascher, "A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War" (Blacksmith Books, 2024)
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…
- Asian Review of Books
Eric Thompson, "The Story of Southeast Asia" (NUS Press, 2024)
Does Southeast Asia “exist”? It’s a real question: Southeast Asia is a geographic region encompassing many different cultures, religions, political styles…