There are any number of serious and worthy reasons to write a book on Alexander the Great, and author and historian Rachel Kousser gives several—including that Alexander’s world was more “globally connected” and “integrated” than our own and how “Alexander’s story does not just give us a different perspective on the past; it also helps us to imagine the future”—but one suspects that in the end it’s that Alexander’s is a ferociously good story. Kousser can be forgiven for that: Alexander has been considered the best of stories going on for 24 centuries. And she tells it well.
Category Archive: Non-Fiction
“Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World” by Caroline Alexander
The China-Burma-India (CBI) theater of the Second World War gets far less attention than the battles in Northwest Europe, Italy, the Eastern front, North Africa and the Pacific. Author Caroline Alexander in her new book Skies of Thunder presents a riveting, faced-paced account of the action there both on the ground and in the skies that would make for a best-selling movie.
“Where does one begin unravelling the history of India and its peoples,” asks Alan Machado (Prabhu) in the first paragraph of his new book Discovering India Anew. At the beginning, he says.
There is much about the way international relations is framed—from the so-called rules-based order to the nation-state itself—that has its origins in the Western history, philosophy and experience. It stands to reason that the traditional view might not map very well onto two non-Western countries an order of magnitude larger than almost any other in the original dataset. In his new book Civilization-States of China and India, Ravi Dutt Bajpai posits that India and China are something other than “nation states”.
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, the inverse—that Julia Child was the Fu Pei-Mei of French cuisine—might be more appropriate.
Part memoir, part documentary, and part travel reportage (in no clear proportion), publisher and bookseller Akshaya Bahibala’s debut book Bhang Journeys tells tales of malady and well-being, all tied to the same source: cannabis.
Thirty years ago, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn published their first book, China Wakes, to critical acclaim. The couple wrote of their five years reporting about China for The New York Times from 1988 to 1993. Other journalists reporting on China have followed suit and we’ve seen books by Jan Wong, Mike Chinoy, Frank Langfitt, Dori Jones Yang, Rob Schmitz, Lenora Chu, and Karoline Kan, among others. There is also the Peace Corps cohort of Peter Hessler and Michael Meyer, who went on to become journalists and write about China. These books have brought China to readers who are both familiar with the country and who are just starting to learn about it, and in most cases, these journalists chose to write about a certain city, region, or period.
Even academic books need to be aware of the prevailing zeitgeist. Richard D McBride begins his history of first-millennium Korea with a pop-culture reference to K-Drama.
Tracy O’Neill was adopted from South Korea in the 1980s and never thought to search for her birth mother until 2020 when the world seemed to stop. She had just landed a tenure-track position at Vassar and had broken up with a long-term boyfriend. With more time on her hands—teaching online and not leaving her new apartment much—she had the desire to find her birth mother in Korea. The story of her search, discovery and meeting her mother is the subject of her third book, Woman of Interest. This is hardly the first adoption memoir, but O’Neill is a writer of some pedigree with a couple of novels under her belt, which perhaps explains why her memoir at times reads like a thriller and does so right at the beginning.
The title (and cover) of Andrew Hillier’s new book The Alcock Album: Scenes of China Consular Life 1843-1853 might lead one to think that it is primarily a collection of drawings and paintings; but while the volume is indeed profusely-illustrated, it is rather more a biography of Henrietta Alcock, the wife of Rutherford Alcock, one of the first British consuls in the treaty ports of Xiamen, Fuzhou and Shanghai in the years immediately after the First Opium War. Both were, as it turns out, proficient at both sketching and watercolors.