Category: Books
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The Appendix: Thinking Outside the Archival Box
The Appendix is one of my favorite history publications. It’s a digital journal started by a group of UT Austin students several years ago, when they decided to create a venue for historians and journalists to share the quirky “extras” of their work—stories that didn’t quite fit in to a traditional academic publication but were…
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LA Review of Books: The Beautiful and Damned
I have a new post up at the LA Review of Books China Blog, about a new(ish) book of translated short stories by 1930s Shanghai author Mu Shiying. Mu was a dashing young man who frequented the city’s nightclubs and wrote dazzling works about the excesses of the age, much like F. Scott Fitzgerald did…
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Books, Books, and More Books: Taking the #HistoriannChallenge
Earlier this month, the New York Times interviewed retired Princeton historian of the Civil War James McPherson for the newspaper’s “By the Book” feature. The Times asked McPherson to name the best historians writing today, the books that have most influenced him, the best treatments of particular subjects, and so forth. When I and a…
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Bookshelf: Charity and Sylvia by Rachel Hope Cleves
As a historian and a reader, my favorite “relaxation” books are the ones that spotlight unknown or unusual personal stories that complicate what we think we know about the past. Sure, I’ll read an analysis of the origins of the Boxer Uprising or a monograph on everyday life in twentieth-century Shanghai—and both of those books…
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LA Review of Books: Driving Toward the Chinese Dream
How to get me to pick up a book about golf: make it about golf in China. At the LA Review of Books main page, I have a review of The Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream, an excellent new book by Dan Washburn (who used to work down the hall from me at…
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LA Review of Books: China’s Forgotten World War II
I wound up doing a sort of sequel to my China’s Forgotten WWI post for the LA Review of Books China Blog, this one looking at—no surprise here—China’s forgotten WWII. The new post is a Q&A with Oxford historian Rana Mitter, author of Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945. I’ve used this book a…
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Bookshelf: In Spite of the Gods
I have an on-again, off-again relationship with a book club here in Shanghai that’s loosely formed around some of the Johns Hopkins alumni in the city. I’ll go for a meeting or two, then skip several in a row because I’m busy or out of the country or don’t feel like reading the work of…
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Writing, New and Old
No blogging here recently because I am in full-on DISSERTATION MODE as I careen down the home stretch. Ten days to go before I have to deliver the finished product to my committee—I’ll make it (I hope!), but working full-bore on the final chapter and editing the ones I’ve already written hasn’t left me with…
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LA Review of Books: City of Reinvention
I took a short break from the LA Review of Books China Blog this spring, as I had conferences to attend and a dissertation to write, but I’m back now and returning to my schedule of posting there once every month or so. My latest post, a review of Amy Tan’s recent novel The Valley…
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Bookshelf: And the City Swallowed Them
Late one night in July 2008, a 22-year-old Canadian model named Diana O’Brien died in the stairwell of her Shanghai apartment building after being stabbed more than 20 times. O’Brien’s assailant was Chen Jun, an 18-year-old migrant worker from impoverished Anhui Province. Like O’Brien, Chen had traveled to Shanghai without proper papers, hoping to wedge…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 