Book of the week–Escape from Hong Kong

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After much anticipation, I finally received and read Tim Luard‘s fabulous Escape from Hong Kong: Admiral Chan Chak’s Christmas Day Dash, 1941 (Hong Kong University Press, 2012).

And boy did it not disappoint.

This has to be one of the most exciting wartime escape stories–and probably the most underreported one.

To start, the cast of [...]

Book of the week–Dream of Ding Village

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With all the Great Leap Forward books I’ve been reading, I thought I’d take a break and try something contemporary. So last week I picked up Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village (Grove Press, 2011), which has been listed as a finalist for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize.

Several weeks ago I read and [...]

Book of the week–His Wife and Daughters

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This week I fired up my Kindle and read Kim Arbor’s page-clicking novel, His Wife and Daughters.

Although the story revolves around the family of a California congressman who is involved in a 1980s sex scandal, it’s so much more than a scandal. As a result, this novel has caused me to look at the [...]

Book of the week–Hungry Ghosts

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One of the most remarkable things about the famine which occurred in China between 1958 and 1962 was that for over twenty years, no one was sure whether it had even taken place.

So begins Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (The Free Press, 1996), the first account of how 30 to 45 million–or [...]

Book of the week–Defiled on the Ayeyarwaddy

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My holiday season has been nice and quiet, allowing me to plow through a few novels and memoirs since my kids went on break 10 days ago. One memoir I recently finished was Ma Thanegi’s Defiled on the Ayeyarwaddy (ThingsAsian Press, 2010).

The title refers to the defiles (gorges) on the Ayeyarwaddy (formerly Irrawaddy) RiverĀ in [...]