I recommend this book because it is one of the few single-authored monographs in English that covers Taiwan cinema exclusively and comprehensively.

The study of Taiwan cinema has proliferated and diversified a great deal in recent years. However, when Hong’s Taiwan Cinema was published in 2011, most books on this subject were edited volumes and tended to have a narrower focus at the time. I like the fact that the author has offered many first-hand research materials.

I learned not only about the history of Taiwan cinema from pre-1945 to the new millennium but also why and how Taiwan cinema has shown the island as a contested nation on screen throughout the many decades. 

This is a valuable edited collection that brings together scholarship from experts in Korea, Japan, Europe, and the United States. The translation of works by East Asian scholars is particularly useful as these materials are largely inaccessible to Western readers. The book spans events from before the war to various memories of the war in the countries involved, touching on specialized topics including Hideyoshi’s planning process, guerrilla warfare in Korea, how the war figured in the grand strategy of the Ming dynasty, and how the war impacted subsequent cultural exchanges between the countries involved.  However, note that this book assumes a basic level of knowledge about the war, so readers are advised to check out one or more of the books above first.

This book uses a transpacific, decolonial, and interdisciplinary approach to study the connections between Latin America and East Asia, concentrating on contemporary commodity extraction and exchanges. The book explores South-South exchanges without Global North metropolitan mediations, thus recentering East Asia-Latin America as an epistemological lens through which to consider these sophisticated networks and produce new knowledge. In my view, the originality of this book resides first in the interdisciplinary connection it makes between the decolonial project and transpacific studies, and secondly, in the two-pronged approach from two unfortunately often disconnected academic perspectives: Latin American and East Asian Studies. 

While only one chapter of Empires of the Silk Road is dedicated to the Scythians, this book is a compelling introduction to Central Eurasian peoples throughout history. Beckwith’s work stabs right at the heart of ancient and modern writings that frame the Scythians and other nomadic peoples within a pejorative “barbarian” framework. More than that, he explores how societies such as the Scythians viewed themselves, which differs greatly from other approaches, which use them only as a foil to more sedentary peoples.

This is a good early analysis of globalization and the enormous transformations it is reputed to have brought about. Its contributions are many, including a conceptualization of globalization that goes beyond economic exchange to include cultural, social, and political dimensions of global interactions.

Overall, Mittelman sees the immense, unsettling tensions in globalization that are likely to give rise to contestation and conflict.

This book is not a page-turner by any means, but what it does have is hidden information through imagination. It is an eyewitness account in Korean, translated into English concerning the 16th-century Japanese Invasion. It is a step-by-step recounting of how one administrator had to flee the Japanese army as they burned their way through his native lands. The hidden joy is knowing that the samurai army is on his heels and you can feel them in the shadow of the book all the way through. It was a joy to read because it allowed me to see how the Japanese behaved in real war if only from a distance and without the problems of an impassioned samurai pen behind the words. 

Almost every one of the hundreds of books I’ve read in the last few years was published in 1925, and The Polyglots was among the most fascinating.

Gerhardie is rarely read now—although republished by NYRB Classics—but at the time, he was widely hailed as a genius: Graham Greene, Isaiah Berlin, and Evelyn Waugh are said to have spent their college days walking around with copies of his books; Greene said Gerhardie was “the most important new novelist to appear in our young life.”

The Polyglots has a Rabelaisian level of goofy mayhem and a Tristram Shandy-like wry understatement, with large ladlefuls of Kafka and Wodehouse. The blasé, amoral hero wanders from Russia’s far east and then onto Harbin, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Cairo, and elsewhere in a rambunctious picaresque journey peopled with eccentrics of every stripe.

As he wrote to his publisher in 1931, when his star was already fading,… show more.

Warned by a Hong-Kong fortune-teller not to risk flying for a whole year, the author – a vastly experienced Far East war and revolutions correspondent of the German Der Spiegel – took what he called “the first step into an unknown world.” It turned out to be one of the most extraordinary years he ever spent: he was marked by death and instead he was reborn. Geography expanded under his feet. Magnificently written in the best traditions of travel literature. A full immersion into the invisible world and belief systems that shape Southeast Asian cultures.

This was one of the first books I read when I was sent out to Japan in 1983 as a young reporter for The Economist.

Richard Hughes was a veteran Australian foreign correspondent in Asia during the Second World War and well beyond, and his very lively memoir brought out for me the mixture of great stories, tangled views of history, cultural incomprehension, and, above all, variety that I was to discover during my own by now 40 years of writing about what we now call the Indo-Pacific but was then, in a very Euro-centric way, known even to Australians as “the Far East.”

Understanding the full scope of the air war in the CBI requires knowledge of Royal Air Force operations against the Japanese, and Probert’s book delivers. I regret that I am not aware of a similar book covering the CBI story from the point of view of the Japanese Army Air Force. Probert begins his book with the arrival of RAF flying boats at Singapore in 1928 and recounts in detail the events of World War II from the debacle in Burma and Malaya in 1941-42 to the hard-won victory in 1945. Substantial appendices, notes, photographs and maps complete the package.