Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu is a senior editor of banking laws in America.
The Second Plane -- September 11: Terror and Boredom by Martin Amis
MICHAEL HSU | 20 May 2008Shifting from a war against cliche to one against terror, the novelist Amis departs from literary battles to unfamiliar engagements of suicide-bombers, Islamic extremism and the inarticulate modern evil, best described by the disgraced theologian Donald Rumsfeld as "The Unknown Unknown."
Doubtless the richness and depth of the writer's imagination justifies Amis's searches. Unlike those cut and paste... [ more ]
Profits, Politics and Panics: Hong Kong's Banks and the Making of a Miracle Economy, 1935-1985 by Leo F. Goodstadt
MICHAEL HSU | 18 March 2008The second volume of a trilogy analyzing Hong Kong business and government, LEO F. GOODSTADT's PROFITS, POLITICS AND PANICS: HONG KONG'S BANKS AND THE MAKING OF A MIRACLE ECONOMY, 1935-1985 neatly integrates monetary policy analysis with the financial history of Hong Kong's unique banking developments. Again, his impeccable research, especially sourcing London's Public Record Office files, provides an unprecedented depth of the narrative that firmly traces the official decision to its original account. A prime example... [ more ]
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink by David Remnick (ed.)
MICHAEL HSU | 16 February 2008The sumptuous offering of 58 selections of New Yorker's best food writing is irresistible. Spanning sixty years of the magazine's reportage, Secret Ingredients reprints the best pieces from the immortals -- A.J. Liebling and M.F.K. Fisher, and the like -- and current epicureans, Anthony Lane and Adam Gopnik, between cameos from Woody Allen, Antony Bourdain, Steve Martin and others.
Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan
MICHAEL HSU | 04 November 2007More than a history refresher, MARGARET MACMILLAN's account of the pivotal 1972 visit by the U.S. President Richard Nixon to China fills in important blanks. The author, formerly a fellow at the University of Toronto, and currently the warden of St. Anthony's College, Oxford, provides a lucid and judicial narrative of Nixon's historic trip to Beijing that was nothing less than the start of modern diplomacy between the two countries. The... [ more ]
Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China 1574-1724 by Liam Matthew Brockey
MICHAEL HSU | 16 September 2007The Jesuits' arrival in 16th century China is rightly described by the late historian Benjamin Nelson as a "civilizational encounter". More than just the meshing of Pauline theology with confucianism, Western science and Chinese astronomy, or transcendental monotheism versus feudal-literati politics, the experience of the Society of Jesus, famously recollected in Matteo Ricci's Dell' entrata della Campagnia di Giesu e... [ more ]
The Dream of Rome by Boris Johnson
MICHAEL HSU | 03 July 2007By all accounts BORIS JOHNSON is too clever by half. Political gaffes and private indiscretion aside, the Old Etonian seems like the impeccable Tory from central casting. Read Classics at Balliol, Johnson was editor of the conservative Spectator magazine and currently serves as a Member of the British Parliament in a perennially safe Conservative Party seat at Henley-on-Thames, succeeding a long line of Tory grandees in both... [ more ]
At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches by Susan Sontag
MICHAEL HSU | 13 May 2007Deconstructing Susan is a daunting exercise. The first lady of American letters was also an extraordinary political polemicist, novelist and philosopher of photography and aesthetics. Her life-long achievement, sampled in these posthumous writings, is much larger than the sum of its parts.
In AT THE SAME TIME: ESSAYS & SPEECHES, as well as her previous collections of essays, Sontag championed the lesser known, and principally... [ more ]
The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India by Tristram Stuart
MICHAEL HSU | 26 November 2006This delightful account of vegetarian pioneers with the names of "Bacon" or "Crab" surely is more than an inside joke, for it also sets the delicious tone in the history of a committed life-style that has never been out of flavor since the early days of the Pythagorean cult in 6th century B.C. that abstained from all forms of meat. Tristram Stuart's first mention of the "bloodless revolution" is just as ancient, referring to... [ more ]
