Category: Books
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Reading Rainbow
Between commuting to work (about 45 minutes each way on mass transit) and traveling (greetings from Orange County, CA!), I have been plowing through books at a prodigious rate these past few months. I often read two to four books a week, making repeated trips to the New York Public Library branch close to my…
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Bookshelf: 13 Men
I made a brief mention in my latest LA Review of Books China Blog post of a new short book by Indian journalist Sonia Faleiro, 13 Men, and wanted to discuss that publication in a bit more depth. 13 Men is the most recent e-book from publishing collective Deca (it’s also available as a Kindle…
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Bookshelf: Midnight in Siberia
For me, a ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway would be an interesting vacation, and one I’ve long wanted to take. For Russians in the past, Trans-Siberian trains carried people away from their homes into exile. But for millions of Russians today, the Trans-Siberian is simply a mode of transport—the most cost-effective way to get from Point…
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LA Review of Books: Q&A with Michael Meyer, Author of In Manchuria
Now up at the LA Review of Books China Blog, my interview with Michael Meyer, author of a wonderful new travelogue/history/memoir about life in China’s Northeast called In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China: MEC: You write that you first voiced the idea of moving from Beijing to Wasteland “after…
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Winter Hibernation
I am so ready for this. Temperatures in New York have plunged this week, and I’m ready to hibernate. Between travel for work and the holidays, I don’t think I’ve spent a full week in my apartment since I moved here over Thanksgiving weekend. But now, I’m looking at my calendar and don’t see any…
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Notes from #AHA2015
The annual meeting of the American Historical Association was held in New York this past weekend. Admittedly, I didn’t have a specific reason to go—I wasn’t on a panel or interviewing for a job or trying to sell a book manuscript—but it seemed odd not to attend when the largest meeting of my (sort-of) profession…
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Bookshelf: The Secret History of Wonder Woman
“Why would a distinguished Harvard professor write about a comic book character?” Heaven forbid a distinguished Harvard professor write about something so common as a comic book character! But as I heard the distinguished Free Library of Philadelphia donor who introduced Harvard historian Jill Lepore at the library last night voice the question he had…
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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…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 