Category: Books
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Weekly Wanderings: February 16, 2026
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…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 8, 2026
I have a new review at The Wall Street Journal, discussing a wonderful and very engaging book by journalist Yi-Ling Liu, The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. I’ve written a lot over the years about the Chinese Party-state’s imposition of internet controls, so it was a refreshing change to…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 1, 2026
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories The AI race is being waged with the top 1% of the 1% of talent in China; the rest of the 99.9% and the humanities majors have much less to look forward to. In the fourth and fifth-tier cities, one of most arresting problems in China…
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Bookshelf: Volga Blues
A current of tension runs throughout the chapters of Volga Blues: A Journey into the Heart of Russia. Sometimes it’s weak, and I forget that Italian journalist Marzio G. Mian and photographer Alessandro Cosmelli are traveling around Russia without authorization or the proper visas, posing instead as a historian and his friend. But then something…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 18, 2026
Thanks for joining me this week. New Goodreads Reviews Recommendations China Stories The conviction of Lai, the self-made entrepreneur and pro-democracy media publisher, was in fact an anti-climax — a footnote in a long and carefully orchestrated exercise to silence one of the Party’s most stubborn and effective critics in the nominally autonomous special administrative…
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Bookshelf: Mission to Mao
The U.S. Army Air Force C-47 transport approached a dirt airstrip in North China, an informal ground crew guiding it in for landing while bystanders watched on a late July day in 1944. As the plane’s wheels touched down, all initially seemed well—until a loud boom sounded, the aircraft veering sharply to its left and…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 4, 2026
So … 2026. What a year, huh? 🤨 One good thing: I had the pleasure of serving as moderator for my friend Joseph Torigian at a discussion of his book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, at Three Cats in Clawson, MI this afternoon. Three Cats is…
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2025 Book Reviews in Review
Have you ever heard someone say “The days are long, but the years are short” about how it feels to raise children? That’s how 2025 has felt to me—kind of a slog on a daily basis, but I can’t believe that we’re now almost at the end. I decided against writing any sort of annual…
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Weekly Wanderings: December 21, 2025
Here we are—the shortest day of the year, and the final regular Weekly Wanderings post of 2025, although I’ll pop into your inboxes next Sunday with a year in review sort of thing. Thank you to everyone who has read, clicked, liked, subscribed, etc. I already have some writing lined up for 2026, both here…
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Weekly Wanderings: December 14, 2025
Two housekeeping notes to start: (1) If you’re in Clawson, Michigan, on Sunday, January 4, I’ll be the discussant for a talk by Joseph Torigian on his book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (read my write-up of the book from earlier this year). Tickets are free,…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 