Asian Review of Books

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 highlighted her year spent in China—often sharing scurrilous, and poorly-sourced–if not entirely unfounded–details of her time there.China historian Paul French tries to set the record straight with Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson (St. Martins: 2024). Simpson managed to have a jam-packed year, with time spent in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, as different warlords fought for control of China.Paul French was born in London and lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His book Midnight in Peking was a New York Times Bestseller and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. He received the Mystery Writers’ of America Edgar award for Best Fact Crime and a Crime Writers’ Association (UK) Dagger award for non-fiction. Both Midnight in Peking and his latest book City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir are currently in development for film.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Her Lotus Year. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Majapahit was Indonesia, and Southeast Asia’s, largest empire. Centered on the island of Java, Majapahit commanded loyalty from vassals across the archipelago: on Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, and even the Malay Peninsula, including a tiny village called Tumasik–known today as Singapore. The empire lasted for around 230 years, from its founding in 1292 to its fall to the Sultanate of Demak in 1527.Today, the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Majapahit is an important source of national pride in today’s Muslim-majority Indonesia: Even the Indonesian coat of arms, with its garuda and the motto “Unity in Diversity”, is rooted in the Majapahit era.But the tale of Majapahit–as told in Herald van der Linde’s book, Majapahit: Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia’s Greatest Empire (Monsoon Books: 2024)–is a story of mythical kings, conquest, betrayal, and intrigue, as Indonesian royals jostled for position…and at times fought off external enemies like the Mongols.Herald van der Linde has travelled, lived and worked in Indonesia and Hong Kong since the 90s. He is also the author of Jakarta: History of a Misunderstood City (Marshall Cavendish International: 2022)You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Majapahit. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 how would the US get it there? The only land route had been cut off by the Japanese invasion, leaving only one other option: air.For the next three years, US planes flew “The Hump”: an air route from Assam to Chongqing, over the dangerous Himalayan mountains and Burmese jungles. Countless planes were lost, whether on a Himalayan mountainside or deep in the jungle.That tale is the subject of Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World (Viking: 2024), by Caroline Alexander, who joins us today.Caroline Alexander is the author of the bestselling The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (Knopf: 1998), which has been translated into thirteen languages. She writes frequently for The New Yorker and National Geographic, and she is the author of four other books, including Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition (Harper Perennial: 1999), the journal of the Endurance ship’s cat.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Skies of Thunder. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 her life’s story. Or, rather, her life’s stories–starting in the slums of Delhi, Devi reinvents herself time-and-time-again, with a new name and a new backstory, as she tries to carve a niche for herself in Indian society–only to be knocked back down, and be forced to start anew, with a new name.Vikas joins the show today to talk about his novel, which settings are perhaps ripped from the headlines, and what The Girl with the Seven Lives says about the idea of meritocracy.Vikas Swarup is a former diplomat, television host and best-selling author who gained global recognition with his debut novel, Q&A (Scribner: 2005). It was filmed as the multiple-Oscar-winning ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. His second book Six Suspects (Random House: 2008) was converted into a nine-part web series titled ‘The Great Indian Murder’, which premiered on Disney+Hotstar and Hulu on the 4th of February, 2022 and became the most watched Hotstar Special ever. His third novel, The Accidental Apprentice (Simon and Schuster UK: 2013), is also being adapted for the screen.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Girl With the Seven Lives. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 beyond the oil age–its ancient ports created the first proper trading system and the launching point for the spread of global Islam.Allen James Fromherz’s new book The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present (University of California Press, 2024) puts the Gulf at the center of a centuries-long story of world history, showing how societies across the region worked around–or even shrugged off–empires to create a system of international commerce that persists today.Allen James Fromherz is Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Studies Center at Georgia State University. He is author of Qatar: A Modern History (Georgetown University Press: 2012) and Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times (Edinburgh University Press: 2010) and editor of The Gulf in World History: Arabia at the Global Crossroads (Edinburgh University Press: 2018)You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Center of the World. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 in 1920s India, which takes a dim view of same-sex relationships, and those that transcend religious boundaries. Like Sharad, the jewelry designer who falls in love with his teacher, Abhik–only for the embarrassment to keep them apart for decades.Ruth Vanita is the author of many books, most recently The Broken Rainbow: Poems and Translations (Copper Coin Publishing: 2023); the novel Memory of Light (Penguin Random House India: 2022); The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varna and Species (Oxford University Press: 2022); Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriages in Modern India (Penguin Books India: 2005). She has translated several works from Hindi to English, including Mahadevi Varma’s My Family (Penguin Books India: 2021). She co-edited the path-breaking Same-Sex Love in India, and edited and translated On the Edge: A Hundred Years of Hindi Fiction on Same-Sex Desire (India Viking: 2023).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Slight Angle. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 general manager–its fifth in as many years–he quickly learned just how much work needed to be done to make a Western symphony orchestra work in a majority Chinese city.John Duffus’s memoir Backstage in Hong Kong: A Life with the Philharmonic, Broadway Musicals and Classical Superstars (Blacksmith: 2024) charts his life from running the Philharmonic, bringing acts like the Three Tenors and Cats to Asia, and his thoughts on the Hong Kong Cultural Center and the West Kowloon Cultural District.John joins the show today to explain what the general manager of an orchestra actually does, the trickiest problems he had to solve in Hong Kong and China, and his thoughts on whether Hong Kong is truly a “cultural wasteland.”You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Backstage in Hong Kong. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 information on U.S. aviation and naval developments to the Japanese, desperate for knowledge of U.S. capability.The funny thing was, as Ron Drabkin notes in his book Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor (William Morrow, 2024), that most people were pretty sure that the boisterous Rutland was spying for someone. But for a variety of reasons—misplaced priorities, bureaucratic infighting, embarrassment over a British national spying on the U.S., or just bewilderment that someone so open and outgoing could pull off something as secretive as espionage—everyone left utland alone until it was too late.Ronald Drabkin is the author of Beverly Hills Spy and peer-reviewed articles on Japanese espionage. His obsession with espionage history started when he was as a child in Los Angeles, where he vaguely understood that his father had been working for the US military in counterintelligence. Later he discovered that his grandfather had also been in “the business,” and it drove a voyage of discovery into previously classified documents on three continents. His career prior to writing was at early stage startups in the US, where he was an early adopter of Google and Facebook advertising.(The Japanese edition of the book can be found here)You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Beverly Hills Spy. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru played a key role in organizing the conference, and Bandung is now seen as a part of Nehru’s push to create a non-Western foreign policy that aligned with neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union.But as Andrea Benvenuti’s Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy (Oxford UP, 2024) points out, Nehru wasn’t actually keen on the idea at all. Nor was Nehru keen on a second summit, feeling that the summit merely highlighted divisions rather than forge consensus. And wrapped up in this whole discussion is Nehru’s attempt to bring China into the fold, perhaps best exemplified by Zhou Enlai, the only leader to emerge as a bigger star from Bandung than Nehru.Andrea Benvenuti is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales, teaching twentieth-century international history at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Nehru’s Bandung. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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 genetics and carbon dating allowing scientists to really test centuries-old legends about where horses came from.For example, historians argued that the Botai civilization in Kazakhstan provided some of the earliest evidence of horse domestication–only for more recent studies to discover that the Botai domesticated an entirely different species of horse altogether.Even a lot more recent horse domestication has a less certain starting date, with recent studies suggesting that the Plains Indians domesticated horses at least a century earlier than originally thought.William T. Taylor is Assistant Professor and Curator of Archaeology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder. He was part of several archaeological expeditions to test some of the proposed starting points for horse domestication—some of which are portrayed in his latest book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History (University of California Press: 2024)You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Hoof Beats. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review