Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

I love to write book reviews. I find it incredibly enjoyable when I’m reading a book and feel something spark—an interesting bit of history, or a new perspective, or a wonderful turn of phrase—that makes me impatient to tell everyone else about what I’m reading. I get excited about a book and I want other people to be excited about it, too, and writing reviews is the best way I’ve found to make that happen.

Unfortunately, over the past few years I haven’t followed through on most of the reviews I’ve intended to write. Publishers send me books (thank you, publishers!), but I don’t have the time to read all of them. And I’m pretty shameless about letting a new arrival capture my attention, while older deliveries languish.

I’m forever resolving to do better. Right now, however, I feel an extra intensity to that resolve because of the discussion that followed the recent decision by leaders at The Washington Post to close its Book World section. Ron Charles, former Book World editor, spoke with NPR host Scott Simon a few days after getting laid off; like Summer Brennan, the part that caught my ear was Charles’s lament about the fate of most new books these days:

But it so depresses me that the vast majority of those books will never get reviewed, never get read, and will just move—you know, the long struggle it took to get that book published—several years probably, many people involved—then the book is published into complete and utter silence and then passes away. That’s very sad.

I can’t fix publishing. I can’t bring back Book World, or the countless other book review sections that have been shut down. But I do have my own site and my own readership, plus good relationships with several editors at a number of places; if I want to review more, I can make that happen.

You’ll see a new review here in a few days, and hopefully more in the future. In an ideal world, I’d love to publish a weekly review—realistically, though, even two a month might be a stretch. I’ll try, though, because good authors and good work deserve it. They shouldn’t be met with “complete and utter silence.”

Thanks for joining me this week.

Recommendations

China Stories

At the same time he was growing his company, Zhisuan Technology, in Beijing, Ding was also an employee at Google — a mid-level software engineer known to his colleagues as Leon, working at the tech giant’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. Nor did Google know that Ding was moonlighting as a startup founder in China, pitching investors and claiming expertise over some of Google’s most valuable assets. — Eliot Chen, “The Moonlighter”

Isaac Chotiner, “What Does Xi Jinping Want?”

Aisha Down, “Chinese technology underpins Iran’s internet control, report finds”

Helen Gao, “The Runaways”

Nathan Law, “Jimmy Lai’s sentencing tells me this: democracy is dead in Hong Kong, and I escaped just in time”

The problem is not that Chinese buyers have lost interest in durian. In fact, the country’s seemingly insatiable appetite for the fruit has continued despite a downturn in the economy late last year. But China’s standards have shifted over the last year or so: No longer do most buyers want the frozen shipments that are Malaysia’s stock-in-trade. They want their fruit fresh. — Zunaira Saieed, with visuals by Lauren DeCicca, “Farmers Made a Fortune on This Fruit. Now It Is Piling Up.”

Lingling Wei and Jeanne Whalen, “The American and Chinese Economies Are Hurtling Toward a Messy Divorce”

Wanderings Around the World

Jacob Bogage, “The disappearing art gallery in your post office”

Ari Daniel, “How a Black fossil digger became a superstar in the very white world of paleontology”

Bradford William Davis, “How do MLB workers protect Latin players from Trump’s ICE raids? By themselves.”

Beirut, too, is still a living, breathing city, with its traffic jams, construction projects, shopping centers, occasional wars and simply the garbage of daily life. It’s not a cordoned-off archaeological park in the manner of Jordan’s Petra or, for that matter, the grand fenced-off ruins within the ancient “City of the Sun,” Baalbek, in eastern Lebanon. Some destruction is inevitable in any thriving city — but there surely have to be limits. Roman remains are simply not replaceable. — Madeline Edwards and João Sousa, “Beirut’s History Is Being Repaved”

Christopher Keyes, “History Is Not a Buffet”

Matteo Latorraca, “In Myanmar, the Old Guard and New Blood Are Uniting To Fight the Junta”

Shan Li, “Getting a Job Is Harder Than Toppling a Government for Bangladesh’s Gen Z”

These tools promise productivity. But it’s a devil’s bargain. Yes, they allow us to do more work. But they don’t always allow us to do better or smarter work. Most importantly, whatever time they save will never become “our own.” History should be our greatest teacher here: economists dreamed that technological advances would usher in a glorious age of shortened work days and expansive leisure and learning, as workers were liberated from the drudgery of mundane tasks now performed by automated machines. But that dream backfired spectacularly. — Anne Helen Petersen, “Don’t Let The Machines Do The Living”

Katie Woo, “The ‘Harvard of umpire schools’ closes as changing times favor tech over tradition”

Featured photo: In the Xizhimen district of Beijing, spring 2005.