Arunabh Ghosh (Princeton University Press, 2020) For information from the publisher, please click here. In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People’s Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world’s largest nations was committed to fundamentally reengineering … [Read more...]
Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border
Sören Urbansky (Princeton University Press, 2020) For information from the publisher, please click here. The Sino-Russian border, once the world’s longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires. Beyond the Steppe Frontier rectifies this by exploring the demarcation’s remarkable transformation—from a vaguely … [Read more...]
Friend: A Novel from North Korea
WEATHERHEAD BOOKS ON ASIA Paek Nam-nyong. Friend: A Novel from North Korea Translated by Immanuel Kim (2020) Paek Nam-nyong’s Friend is a tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the story unfolds into a broader … [Read more...]
The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media
Nathan Shockey (Columbia University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Charting the relationships among prose, politics, and print capitalism, he … [Read more...]
Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China
Mary Brazelton (Cornell University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mary Augusta Brazelton examines the PRC's public health campaigns of the 1950s to explain just how China managed to … [Read more...]
