http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com Reviews of books about Asia and/or by Asian authors. en-us reviewed by Vaughan Rapatahana. The Maldives are today best-known as a collection of resorts populated by tourists rather than an indigenous people with a unique culture and long traditions. Spanish author-anthropologist Xavier Romero-Frias collected the 80 folk-tales presented here over a period of 28 years and in so doing reveals that there is considerably more to the Maldives than a spot for wealthy visitors from other... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1457 23 May 2013 by Jennifer Wong. Jennifer is a Hong Kong poet now residing in London. Goldfish is her second collection. http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1460 22 May 2013 reviewed by Jonathan Chatwin. Contemporary culture has become increasingly comfortablewith the idea of modernizing or re-imagining canonical literary texts in pursuit of new artistic or commercial ends. The phenomenon has been evident both in cinema and literature, and demonstrates a wide variance in the degree of reverence which the source material is afforded; thus in the literary sphere, we have recent works ranging from... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1455 20 May 2013 reviewed by Peter Gordon. Central Asia today rarely seems central to much of anything aside from geography. Its vast steppes, deserts and mountains are places usually passed over, often from 10,000 meters up.But it was not always so as Christoph Baumer makes clear in theextravagantly-produced The Age of the Steppe Warriors, the first volume of a planned four-volume series on The History of Central Asia. The evidence... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1443 18 May 2013 reviewed by Bill Purves. College coming-of-age novels are a pretty well-worn genre. They invariably revolve around sex, scatological humour, grade anxiety, teenage angst, and more sex. But The Gunners of Shenyangis set in a provincial university in China in 1963, in the brief interval between the Communist Partys great famine and its cultural revolution. In those days, once admitted, students were state employees on... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1451 16 May 2013 reviewed by Mia Warren. In a market currently dominated by otherworldly and futuristic dystopia, historical young adult fictionwhen done rightis an agreeable, if less trendy, alternative for teenage bookworms. In Kay Honeymans debut novel, The Fire Horse Girl, young readers gain exposure to a woefully neglected chapter of U.S. history: Chinese immigration to the United States during the period of the Chinese... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1446 14 May 2013 by Peter Gordon. New books by Joshua Kurlantzick and Joe Studwell discuss how conventional political and orthodoxies don't fit current Asian reality. http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1454 12 May 2013 reviewed by Shahbano Bilgrami. From the moment you read the very first page of Mohsin Hamids How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, it is difficult to distance yourself from the books protagonist. The protagonist is, in fact, you, the reader, and the story that unfolds is the tale of your meteoric rise, the kind of miraculous reversal of fortune that many desperately dream of but only a lucky few achieve. Hamids latest... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1447 10 May 2013 reviewed by Timothy Sifert. Jason Donahue, the Hong Kong banker at the centre of Phillip Y. Kims debut novelNothing Gained, has been living the male expat fantasy. The night before he dies, Jason is at a closing dinner for a very unethical $120 million investment in a money-spinning Macau casino. Dominique Flaubert, his French paramour and subordinate at investment bank Barker Reed, is by his side. His beautiful... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1445 8 May 2013 by Caitlin Dwyer. Tash Aws new novel, Five Star Billionaire, follows five Malaysian immigrants in Shanghai as they struggle to succeed in the Chinese boom. Aw spoke with the Asian Review of Books about writing about a new kind of Asian migrant experience. http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1449 6 May 2013 reviewed by Andrew Greenberg. One fact can alter your entire understanding of a place. As a student of Middle East studies, I took a course about the history of the Persian (or, depending on whom you ask, Arabian) Gulf. One morning, the professor coaxed us into guessing which vegetables production in Saudi Arabias had seen the most growth in the past decade. We spat out ideas until he finally told us the answer: potatoes.... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1450 5 May 2013 by John McHugo. The upheavals now known as the Arab Spring cannot be understood unless they are put in the context of the long history of the Arabs. What are the origins of the confusions and complications that afflict our Western understanding of the Arab world? How did this distinction we constantly draw between East and West begin, and how valid is it? Whose fault is it that things so often went wrong?... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1442 3 May 2013 reviewed by Timothy Sifert. Paris-basedVietnamese novelist-in-exile and former Party memberDuong Thu Huongs latest work The Zenithslowly reveals that sisters Xuan and Dongtheir names meaning Spring and Winterhave been murdered. Young Xuan was the only woman that the mucholder Ho Chi Minh, Vietnams president, ever loved. But his desire to go public with the marriage, and legitimizetheir offspring, prompts the... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1438 1 May 2013 reviewed by Jill Baker. Identity and resilience are leitmotifs in Five Star Billionaire, Tash Aws new page-turner of a novel set in Shanghai. Fittingly, the novel opens with an ID card being lost and found: lost by a Chinese national, and found by Phoebe Chen Aiping, a frightened but plucky young Malaysian immigrant, determined to make something of herself, lured to the city by the promise of a job that doesnt... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1444 30 April 2013 reviewed by Mia Warren. The collision of mass destruction and immense human loss is a difficult experience to encapsulate in narrative form, perhaps even more so for an outsider. One method is to employ long-form journalism, as John Hersey did in his 1946 book Hiroshima, which focused on the stories of six survivors of the atom bomb. Gretel Ehrlichs Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami is perhaps a... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1437 29 April 2013 reviewed by Peter Gordon. Soon after the Arab Spring was sprung, I sat in on a discussion in Hong Kong in which a visiting American expert on Asia was asked whether the Arab Spring, or its root causesdetermined to be some combination of a desire for democracy and the facilitating effects of modern communications technologiesmight spread to China. It was discussed whether the Arab Spring was analogous to the late... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1439 26 April 2013 reviewed by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar. The epics have stayed alive in India through a vigorous tradition of oral telling. This tradition has also cast the Ramayana into several avatars, the story being reinterpreted by region, language, caste in South and Southeast Asia. R. K. Ramanujan, a renowned scholar of Indian literature, in his essay titled 300 Ramayanas, recounts myriad retellings of the epic, many of which contrast with the... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1436 24 April 2013 reviewed by Vernon Ram. Protestations to the contrary, Still Counting The Deadbears the same brutal impactas Sidney Shanbergs The Killing Fieldsthe gut-wrenching Pulitzer Prize book-turned-film of one of the most gruelling genocides in Cambodia. Frances Harrison, who authored this book, first went to Sri Lanka as a BBC Correspondent in 2002, the year the Sri Lankan Government and LTTE (Liberation Tamil Tigers Eelam)... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1419 23 April 2013 reviewed by Todd Shimoda. Japanese literature has a strong vein of surrealistic, hyper-fantastical science fiction. Yasutaka Tsutsuis Paprikafalls squarely in that genre. The riotous story takes place mostly in the Institute for Psychiatric Research, where the research focuses on psychotherapy through dreams and technology called PT devices. The combination of the two allows a therapist to enter patients dreams to... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1421 21 April 2013 reviewed by Melanie Ho. While its title may suggest otherwise, the authors of Doing Business with China: Avoiding the Pitfallsadvise their readers their book is not intended to be a manual on how to do business in China. Rather, Stewart Hamilton and Jinxuan (Anne) Zhang, hope their book will serve as a guide for foreign companies reviewing their China strategy or those who are seeking some helpful tips and... http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1431 19 April 2013