The Blakiston’s fish owl is the world’s largest living species of owl, with larger females of the species weighing as much as ten pounds. It lives in the Russian Far East and Northern Japan. It is also endangered: global populations are estimated to be around 1500 owls in total.
Category Archive: Podcast
“Ivy Lin was a thief but you would never know it to look at her.” White Ivy, the debut novel by Susie Yang, is the story of Ivy Lin, a Chinese-American teenager growing up just outside of Boston, where she struggles to achieve the trappings of suburban teenagerhood. Years later, as a 27-year-old teacher haunted by confused feelings about her upbringing, she comes across characters from her past, which spurs a desire—perhaps an obsessive one—to remake her life. The novel has won rave reviews in publications and book clubs across the United States over the past few months.
Det, Chang and Lek are young university students living in Thailand during the 1970s. It is a turbulent time for the country’s politics: student-led protests in 1973 succeeded in (briefly) overthrowing the country’s military dictatorship. Det, Chang and Lek—three students from very different backgrounds—navigate the country’s changing politics from the streets of Bangkok to the jungles of northern Thailand.
Visitors around the world have traveled to Europe to see the tall spires and stained glass windows of the continent’s Gothic cathedrals: in Cologne, Chartres, Milan, Florence, York and Paris. The trappings of Gothic architecture have become shorthand for “medieval Europe”. Yet in Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe, Diana Darke investigates the Islamic origins of Gothic architecture, tracing its history through pre-Islamic Syria through the Islamic empires to the tall European cathedrals between the 12th and 17th centuries.
Most of our discussions about how “technology will change the world” focus on the global cities that drive the world economy. Even when we talk about China, we focus on its major cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Xiaowei Wang corrects this metronormativity in Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, which explores how rural China is not just adapting the technology used around the world, but innovating on it.
Mongolia is sometimes seen as one of the few examples of a successful youth-led revolution, where a 1990 movement forced the Soviet-appointed Politburo to resign. In Young Mongols: Forging Democracy in the Wild, Wild East, Aubrey Menard profiles many of today’s young activists in Mongolia, in a wide array of different areas like pollution, feminism, LGBT rights, and journalism.
“To mother, from Tsuneno (confidential). I’m writing with spring greetings. I went to Kanda Minagawa-chō in Edo—quite unexpectedly—and I ended up in so much trouble!”
Sarah Mullins, an American woman, arrives at “The Kingdom”: a fading luxury apartment complex in Bangkok. She is there to lay low, after passing over forged collectors’ items in Hong Kong. She meets the other residents of the Kingdom, including the energetic, yet mysterious Mali. This starts an unfolding story set amidst the fictional backdrop of growing protests, as both the Kingdom’s expatriate tenants and the local Thai staff evaluate what will happen next.
As China grows into a major regional and global power, there are many questions about what this means for the international system. Does China threaten the United States? Does Washington want to aggressively contain China? Are we really facing a “New Cold War”? And what does this mean for everyone else?
The Asian Review of Books is launching a series of podcasts together with the New Books Network, hosted by Nicholas Gordon.