Peter Gordon
Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books.
Hong Kong Culture: Word and Image by Kam Louie (ed.)80±: a photobook project by Mary Lee
PETER GORDON | 30 August 2010Recent weeks have provided the unexpected spectacle of people in Guangzhou and later Hong Kong demonstrating in favour of Cantonese, the local language (or dialect as some would incorrectly have it). It may be unclear what a Cantonese identity consists of, but there clearly is one.
A distinct identity often goes hand-in-hand with a distinct culture, and the question whether Hong Kong has either or both... [ more ]
The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze Age Herders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony
PETER GORDON | 22 August 2010Indo-European languages, the family that includes English, are spoken by some three billion people, making it the most widely spoken group of related languages in the world. It was a matter of some surprise in the late eighteenth century when it was discovered that Sanskrit, and hence the modern languages descended from Sanskrit, such as Hindi and Bengali, were related to Greek, Latin, and their descendants. Since then, it has... [ more ]
Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness by Cathryn H. Clayton
PETER GORDON | 13 August 2010I have long considered Hong Kong, in spite of its now being firmly part of China, to have more de facto sovereignty than many nominally independent countries. Unlike most countries in the European Union and the Schegen Area, Hong Kong has its... [ more ]
Japan Transformed: Political Change and Economic Restructuring by Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Michael F. Ties
PETER GORDON | 05 August 2010"Why Study Japan?" asks the right-hand page header of the first chapter of JAPAN TRANSFORMED: POLITICAL CHANGE AND ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING. What with all the China-this and China-that these days, why indeed?
Because, argue these two professors from Yale and UCLA, "despite two decades of economic stagnation, Japan remains a colossal power," that "Japan began reinventing itself in the 1990s" and that "Japan's political economy in the twenty-first century... [ more ]
The Road to Wanting by Wendy Law-Yone
PETER GORDON | 22 July 2010Novels by Burmese authors, even expatriate ones, come along only rarely, and WENDY LAW-YONE's THE ROAD TO WANTING merits attention for that reason alone. It is also, however, rather good.
Na Ga, a young woman originally of the "Wild Lu" tribe is stuck in Wanting, a Yunnanese town on the Burmese border, waiting to be taken over the border. Her journey there, the story of her life, is told in flashback.
[ more ]
The Happy Valley: A History and Tour of the Hong Kong Cemetery by Ken Nicholson
PETER GORDON | 23 June 2010As Hong Kong landmarks either crumble or are redeveloped into upscale shopping malls and boutique hotels, we should be grateful for small mercies. One of these is Hong Kong University Press's evident attempt to document the history that is all around us. Following Signs of a Colonial Era, which covered Hong Kong's street signs and monuments, comes THE HAPPY VALLEY: A HISTORY AND TOUR OF THE HONG KONG CEMETERY by Hong Kong-resident landscape designer and architect KEN NICHOLSON,... [ more ]
Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus by Oliver Bullough
PETER GORDON | 17 June 2010OLIVER BULLOUGH, a one-time Moscow-based reporter, is angry: angry about the way Russia -- in its Tsarist, Soviet and contemporary post-Soviet incarnations -- has treated the multitudinous ethnic groups that inhabit the North Caucasus: the Chechens, Ingush, Avars and, above all, the Circassians.
He recounts a sorry tale, in fact several, of more than two centuries of conquest, oppression, deportation,... [ more ]
China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
PETER GORDON | 02 June 2010If you read only one book on China, make it this one.
JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM has in CHINA IN THE 21ST CENTURY: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW skillfully distilled Chinese history and current affairs into one hundred or so mini-sections, each just of two paragraphs to a page and a half long. The breadth of these sections is staggering, ranging from "What were Confucius's cores ideas?", "How did dynasties interact with foreign countries" and "What was the 'Warlord... [ more ]
