Washington officials have long found Pyongyang a bedeviling problem. Much of their frustration has come from a lack of information on a country that Donald Gregg—a Korea expert who served in Seoul as US ambassador and before then as chief of the CIA station there—called Washington’s “longest-running intelligence failure”. Without information, as Gregg argued in his 2014 autobiography Pot Shards, “we fill our gaps of ignorance with prejudice, and the result is hostility fueled by demagoguery, and damage done to all concerned.”
Category Archive: Non-Fiction
Bernie Wong was born in Hong Kong in 1943, but her story begins in South America. Her mother, Virginia Chia, was born and raised in Huacho, Peru, to a father named Carlos Chia, who had come from China to run a shipping business in South America, and a mother named Cristina Salinas who was half-Chinese and half-Basque and relished her role as a socialite more than that of a mother. Virginia’s parents split up while she was still a young girl, after Cristina discovered that Carlos had another wife and family back in China. Cristina kicked him out and had their marriage annulled.
Pakistan’s politics is so complicated that it can be hard to determine either a trajectory or even a throughline. If Tahir Kamran’s enormously-detailed Chequered Past, Uncertain Future is any indication, this is not due to any failure of imagination. Kamran is focused mostly on the country’s often fraught relationship with democracy, but leaves one with much the same impression about foreign and domestic policy and issues of Pakistani identity.
Tokyo-based American author Ronald Drabkin has written a riveting, fast-paced account of a Beverly Hills-based spy who engaged in intelligence collection for Japan and provided the Japanese Navy with naval aviation technical expertise before Japan’s attack on American ships, planes and forces at Pearl Harbor.
Vita Sackville-West’s novel The Edwardians describes a famous explorer forced to perform as “the lion of the hour” in the drawing room of a great country estate. For this earnest scientist and adventurer, it’s a painful humiliation for him to don white tie and attempt polite conversation with idle aristocrats who have no clue where he has been or what he has achieved. Arminius Vambéry, who in the course of his life wore many different costumes, put on many masks and cycled through the world’s religions, enjoyed nothing better than regaling a society drawing room with his tales of the exotic orient. He made a career out of being “lion of the hour”. Anabel Loyd’s new biography of Vambéry painstakingly and thoughtfully explores how Vambéry pulled this off.
Electrification is likely not the first thing that comes to mind when reflecting, as it were, on Hong Kong. But in Let There Be Light, a history of China Light & Power (CLP), Mark Clifford convincingly makes the case for the centrality of electricity in the Hong Kong story. Electricity not only made Hong Kong’s success possible, but it also serves as an illuminating prism through which to look at and rethink much conventional wisdom about Hong Kong. Intertwined with this narrative of political and economic development is the larger-than-life persona of Lawrence Kadoorie, who headed CLP for five decades.
It can come as a surprise that the largest Muslim (or perhaps more accurately, Muslim-majority) country is Indonesia, far from the religion’s origins in the Middle East. It is—probably as a result—not always included, or at least not centrally, in discourse about Islam. James M Dorsey, on the other hand, puts the country front and center in his new book The Battle for the Soul of Islam.
Museums are not having the best press at the moment. In addition to long-running disputes over the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles and Benin Bronzes, there have a been a recent spate of “returns” of items deemed to have been looted or stolen, ranging from a 2700-year-old gold and carnelian necklace in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts from Turkey to a bevy of Khmer sculptures that had pride of place at such leading museums as the Metropolitan Cleveland Museum of Art. Although Justin M Jacobs’s recent Plunder? How Museums Got Their Treasures (with a telling question mark) deals with controversies regarding acquisitions of a more historical vintage, it is hard not to draw a line between them and these more recent developments.
Now merely one of the fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minority groups in the People’s Republic of China, for almost a millennium the Uyghurs were among Central Asia’s most dominant political, economic and cultural forces.
In both English and Chinese, the term warlord, or junfa, immediately conjures the image of a rapacious strongman, violent and reactionary. The territorial aggrandizement of these military men nipped Chinese democracy in the bud, contributing to the fragmentation and instability of the Republican period (1912-1949). But the warlords who vied for power after the final dynasty’s collapse were also husbands, fathers, and friends. By centering the women in their lives, Kate Merkel-Hess’s Women and Their Warlords: Domesticating Militarism in Modern China, revisits the history and memory of a dynamic era and highlights the political valences of intimate relationships.