Category: Books
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Bookshelf: Silk Roads
As much as I love to cook, I’m hopeless at reverse-engineering recipes. I’ve eaten plenty of dishes that I wish I could replicate at home, only to be defeated by my lack of skills. (Also, probably, my unwillingness to use as much butter and salt as the original chef likely did.) I have little sense…
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Weekly Wanderings: October 20, 2025
Thanks for joining me this week. New Goodreads Reviews Recommendations China Stories Eliot Chen, “Laura Murphy on Enforcing America’s Ban on Uyghur Forced Labor” Wang, who has more than 800,000 subscribers on YouTube, is representative of a small but influential part of the Mandarin-language media landscape. He is part of an exodus of media professionals…
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Weekly Wanderings: October 12, 2025
The Phillies season has ended; the Flyers season has begun. Time marches on. Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories Emma Belmonte, “A Surrogacy Silk Road: Chinese Parents Head West for Babies” Yangyang Cheng, “No Country for A Woman” While men and boys are perceived to have more potential, are allowed more time,…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 28, 2025
Thanks for joining me this week. New Goodreads Review Recommendations China Stories James T. Areddy, “Jerome Cohen, the First American to Practice Law in China, Dies at 95” Yangyang Cheng, “Being a Journalist in China” (audio) Eric Fish, “The ‘Iron Dam’ that became China’s deadliest secret” (audio) Francesca Regalado, “A Curator Flees Bangkok After China Deems…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 21, 2025
Thanks for joining me this week. New Goodreads Reviews Recommendations China Stories Chang Che, “‘I have to do it’: Why one of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China” Beijing’s white paper on national security, published in May, pivots from emphasising the pre-eminence of internal and regime security to lauding China…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 14, 2025
Thanks for joining me this week. Recent Goodreads Reviews Recommendations China Stories As the United States slides further into autocracy, the numbing freeze of fear is creeping back into my veins. I have accepted exile, but I’m not ready for imprisonment. I have left the old country, but I’m not ready to abandon the new…
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Weekly Wanderings: September 7, 2025
And we’re back! I, of course, thought that taking August “off” would enable me to get completely caught up on life. The books I would read! The closets I would organize! The freezer I would restock! Needless to say, most of my plans did not come to fruition, though I did clean out my garage…
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Bookshelf: Breakneck
The first copy of Breakneck I received looked like the quintessential fear-mongering China book. Against an inky black background a red graphic appeared—somewhat difficult to identify, but it seemed to be a towering building with cranes or construction equipment extending from its top. BREAKNECK, in white, stretched across the lower third of the space, and…
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Weekly Wanderings: June 24, 2025
June is almost over, and I have no idea where the month went. Well, that’s not entirely true. June has been a morass of worrying about the world. Of enduring a violent heat wave. Of feeling like I should be taking advantage of the Michigan summer—but ugh, I have so much else to do. Of…
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Wall Street Journal: “Twins Torn Apart”
I’ve just published a new book review at the Wall Street Journal, about Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins, by journalist Barbara Demick: “You’re not allowed to keep this child,” a Family Planning official informed Xiuhua. Another man held her wailing 21-month-old niece,…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 