Tag: Books and Literature

A Writer’s To-Do List: Learn History. Learn Chinese. Learn to Draw Comics.

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When Tessa Hulls set out to write a book about three generations of women in her family, she had few illusions about how hard the task would be. The tale was geographically sprawling, and spanned a century: Her grandmother Sun Yi, a journalist in Shanghai, fled China for Hong Kong in 1957, then slowly went mad; her mother, Rose, attended an elite boarding school in Hong Kong founded in part for the mixed-race children of European expatriates, then moved to the United States in 1970. Much of her family’s story…

Murder and Magic Realism: A Rising Literary Star Mines China’s Rust Belt

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For a long time during Shuang Xuetao’s early teenage years, he wondered what hidden disaster had befallen his family. His parents, proud workers at a tractor factory in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, stopped going to work, and the family moved into an empty factory storage room to save money on rent. But they rarely talked about what had happened, and Mr. Shuang worried that some special shame had struck his family alone. It was not until later that he learned about the mass layoffs that swept northeastern China…

Book Review: ‘Means of Control,’ by Byron Tau; ‘The Sentinel State,’ by Minxin Pei

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MEANS OF CONTROL: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State, by Byron Tau THE SENTINEL STATE: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, by Minxin Pei In 1975, the French philosopher Michel Foucault published “Surveiller et Punir” — “To Surveil and Punish” — a book popularly translated into English as “Discipline and Punish,” about how societies keep their populations in line with minimal violence. At the center of his argument lay the panopticon, a prison designed by the 18th-century political reformer…

Book Review: ‘Smoke and Ashes,’ by Amitav Ghosh

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SMOKE AND ASHES: Opium’s Hidden Histories, by Amitav Ghosh Biographies of humble things that their authors claimed had “changed the world” — chronometers, salt, potatoes and even the color mauve — were a turn-of-the-21st-century publishing phenomenon. Looking back, they seem fixated on European heroes and their achievements. As Amitav Ghosh observes at the beginning of his bracing new history of the global opium trade, it’s hard to see past a Western conception of the world that “looms so large that it obscures everything else.” “Smoke and Ashes” is the story…

Ai Weiwei’s ‘Zodiac’ Is a Mystical Memory Tour

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As the Year of the Dragon dawns, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has released “Zodiac,” a “graphic memoir” of scenes from his career — both real (hanging with Allen Ginsberg, the O.G. of Beat poets, in 1980s Greenwich Village) and imagined (debating Xi Jinping, China’s paramount leader). Each chapter frames the artist’s take on traditional beliefs about the characteristics humans share with the 12 animals of the Chinese lunar calendar. Gianluca Costantini’s intricate line drawings pair with Elettra Stamboulis’s comic-bubble text to help expand Ai’s lifelong campaign for free expression…

New Books About Non-European Militaries

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One of the benefits of studying the military histories of non-European groups is that it reminds us that there are very different means of waging war, as well as reasons for doing so. In THE CUTTING-OFF WAY: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800 (University of North Carolina Press, 287 pp., paperback, $29.95), Wayne E. Lee argues that the fluid, Native American style of war was quite alien to the European soldiers who encountered it. Tribes like the Tuscarora and the Cherokee avoided battles and conventional sieges, instead carrying out…

12 African Artists Leading a Culture Renaissance Around the World

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In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading abolitionist, activist, writer and orator, as well as the first African American to be nominated for vice president of the United States. Diop is no stranger to portraying the aches and hopes of Black people…

How Aligning With China Changed Life in the Solomon Islands

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In Honiara, they’ve just finished this brand-new stadium, and there’s not enough medicine in the main hospital in the country. There’s medicine shortages, so they’re turning people away from the hospital. You couldn’t ask for a more clear contrast in terms of the misallocation of priorities from the Chinese approach. And that really angers people. There is a really quite sad cynicism among many rural Solomon Islanders that nothing will ever change. They saw billions of dollars getting pumped into Honiara previously from Australia in terms of its peacekeeping efforts…

Ed Young Dies at 91; Infused His Illustrations With Chinese Tradition

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Ed Young, whose illustrations in some 100 children’s books, many of which he also wrote, mesmerized young and not-so-young readers with intricate depictions of fairy tales, poetry and his own life story as a Chinese immigrant, died on Sept. 29 at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 91. His daughter Antonia Young confirmed the death. Mr. Young trained as an architect and worked as a graphic designer; he never intended to become an illustrator of children’s books. But a chance opportunity to work on the book “The Mean Mouse…

Book Review: ‘Sparks,’ by Ian Johnson

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SPARKS: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, by Ian Johnson By now, it is almost clichéd to compare political misrule to the dystopia that Orwell conjured through the story of the low-ranking functionary Winston Smith in “1984,” but so many aspects of the novel have come true in today’s China — from mass surveillance to fury-inciting demagogy to President Xi Jinping’s declaration that the Communist Party’s rule is “the conclusion of history” — that it may appear to preclude, as it ultimately did for Smith, the possibility…