Category: Books
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Leftover Women: In Pictures
I began reading Leta Hong Fincher’s eagerly anticipated Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China last night, and one chapter in, I now know that the Marriage and Family Research Association here classifies me as a Category 3 Leftover Woman (ages 31-35, dubbed the “Buddha of victorious battles” for achieving professional advancement—though a…
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LA Review of Books: Ping-Pong Powerhouses and Table Tennis Tales
I think this will be my final post related to last month’s literary festivals. I saw journalist Nicholas Griffin speak at the Capital M Litfest in Beijing about his new book, Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game that Changed the World, and not long after managed to get my hands on a copy.…
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Recap: #SILF2014
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Shanghai Litfest is one of the best things about living in the city. This is the third time I’ve been around to attend it, and I went to far more sessions this year than I ever have before. I can honestly say that I didn’t…
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LA Review of Books: River of Dust
This year’s Shanghai International Literary Festival was a whole lot of fun—I got to see half a dozen excellent writers discuss their latest work, and I hope to post a rundown of all that later today or tomorrow. I was also asked to moderate one session, which featured novelist Virginia Pye talking about the family…
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Beijing Event: China’s Past/China’s Present
As promised, full details about the event I’ll be doing with Jeff Wasserstrom in Beijing on the morning of Wednesday, March 19 are now up on the Foreign Correspondents’ Club website.
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Shanghai Event: History in the Headlines
Next Thursday (March 13), Jeff Wasserstrom and I will be speaking at lunchtime event hosted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Shanghai. In “History in the Headlines: How Does China’s Past Inform the Present?”, we’ll be putting current events in a long-term perspective, which is something that both of us do in our respective writing…
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It’s Shanghai Litfest Time Again!
The Shanghai International Literary Festival is a bright spot in the middle of Shanghai’s cold, damp winters. This year’s festival kicked off last night with a very swanky cocktail party at the Glamour Bar on the Bund. (The fact that I was willing to put on makeup, heels, and stockings on a Wednesday night is…
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Bookshelf: Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing
The seventy-something guy seated next to me on my flight from Philadelphia to Fort Myers, Florida last month peered at the spine of my book and guffawed at the title. “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking?” he snorted. “I didn’t know they had any food to cook over there!” It’s an easy, obvious joke to…
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Bookshelf: Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade
One of my Fourteen Books for 2014 I’ve always heard that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, but I was not fully aware of how much treasure is out there until I spent the weekend reading journalist Adam Minter’s lucid and engrossing new book on the global scrap and recycling business, Junkyard Planet: Travels…
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#AHA2014: Book Mania
Like every other historian I know, I love books and can’t resist a deal (or free ones). Publishers are aware of this, and they enable us to quench our thirst for new reading material by setting up huge exhibition halls at academic conferences like the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) that I’ve…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 