Asian Review of Books

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The Asian Review of Books is the only dedicated pan-Asian book review publication. Widely quoted, referenced, republished by leading publications in Asian and beyond and with an archive of more than two thousand book reviews, the ARB also features long-format essays by leading Asian writers and thinkers, excerpts from newly-published books and reviews of arts and culture. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

  1. 3d ago

    Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia with Hans van de Ven (Basic Books, 2026)

    In March 1942, Japanese troops landed on Java's north coast and were welcomed by many of the Indonesians they had come to conquer. It’s an indication of just how much the Second World War undermined the foundations of European empire, setting up a postwar order that still governs Asia today. Hans van de Ven’s new book Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia (Basic Books, 2026) starts in the 19th century, as European empires spread across Asia—only for Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, followed by its rapid advance south in 1941, to undermine the rationale for Western influence and control in China, Indonesia and India—and then, even after Japan’s defeat, the West was forced to retreat from the region.  Hans van de Ven is a professor of modern Chinese history at Cambridge University and a visiting chair professor in history at Peking University. He is the author or editor of ten previous books on Chinese history and the history of warfare. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Blood Dawn. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  2. Oct 22

    Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade

    After Caesar's assassination, the triumvirs drew up a kill list; one such target, a man named Lucius Plotius Plancus, fled to a villa near Naples and tried hiding behind a curtain. The soldiers found him anyway–thanks to his heavy perfume. Pliny the Elder, writing a century later, used the perfume to suggest the killing was justified. Historians have often taken that at face value, as proof that Rome despised Eastern luxuries. Jeremy Simmons reads it as a joke—Pliny was calling the man a walking corpse.  In Jeremy’s latest book Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade (Princeton, July 2026) he asks what happened when goods like pepper and perfume arrived at their destinations. The goods took on new lives: perfume became a way of talking about death, pepper a medicine prescribed for its heat, Roman coins turned pendants in South Asia—or how soldiers knew the price of spices even on remote Hadrian’s Wall.  Jeremy is an assistant professor of history and the college at the University of Chicago. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Sea of Treasures. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  3. Oct 15

    Shanghai: The Story of China's Most Dynamic City with Michael Dillon (Yale UP, 2026)

    The Bund's grand facades and the leafy streets of the former French Concession are usually read as monuments to Western enterprise in China. But those buildings were raised by Chinese labor, and the concessions that defined old Shanghai could not have run without the Chinese who served, traded, and lived inside them. In Shanghai: The Story of China's Most Dynamic City (Yale University Press: 2026), Michael Dillon sets out to tell the city's story from the Chinese side. Michael's new book follows the city from a small fishing town on the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtze, through the Opium War and the treaty ports, the foreign concessions, the Japanese occupation, and the Communist takeover, to its place today as the most representative city of China's forward-looking, economy-driven modernization. Drawing on Chinese-language sources, Michael argues that Shanghai's history has been told for too long through Western eyes. Michael joins the show today to talk about Shanghai's long rivalry with Beijing, the 1927 Shanghai Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and Deng Xiaoping's later admission that leaving Shanghai out of the first special economic zones was a mistake. Michael Dillon is professor of history and an affiliate of King’s College London’s Lau China Institute. An expert on modern Chinese history, politics, and society, he is the author of numerous books, including We Need to Talk About Xi, a history of modern China, and biographies of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shanghai. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  4. Oct 8

    The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts

    Winston Churchill famously called Russia "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." But what if the riddle is partly of our own making—the product of a habit of looking only west for answers? Michael Khodarkovsky today argues that to understand Russia, we need to look east, to the steppe and the empires it shaped. Michael’s new book, The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts (Yale UP, 2026), sets Russia beside the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal empires in order to uncover the things that connect them: universal monarchy, reliance on outsider elites, law in the service of the state. From the Mongol conquest to Putin's Russia. the steppe ends up explaining more than we’d expect it to.  Michael is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author, most recently, of Russia’s 20th Century: A Journey in 100 Histories and Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Steppe and Its Empires. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  5. Oct 1

    Alone in Japan: A Journey to the Future with Tom Feiling (Allen Lane, 2025)

    Japan has been aging for decades. The country’s birth rate first fell below the replacement rate in 1974, long before phrases like the “demographic transition” and the “silver economy” became commonplace. Now, with many countries rich and small staring at the prospect of an aging population, what’s happening in Japan may now be a leading indicator as to what other countries may soon struggle with.  Tom Feiling, author of Alone in Japan: A Journey to the Future (Allen Lane, 2026), spent three years in Tokyo when Japan was a vibrant, thriving economy and a symbol of a possible future. Twenty-four years later, he returned to find a different country, with a shrinking workforce, changing opinions on relationships and isolation, and villages quickly running out of people. Tom is a writer and journalist. His celebrated books include The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World, Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the New Colombia and The Island that Disappeared: Old Providence and the Making of the Western World. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Alone in Japan. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  6. Sep 24

    Mehran Gul, "The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

    Increasingly, it seems like the corporate names that dominate headlines are much more diverse than they used to be. Samsung, TSMC, and SK Hynix. Alibaba and Tencent; BYD and DeepSeek. Sea and Grab.  For twenty-five years, it seems like every major technology was American . That assumption is now under strain as innovation spreads from one place to many.  Mehran Gul tries to map out this new network in his book The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies (Simon and Schuster, 2026). From China's startlingly messy AI ecosystem to Singapore's government-led innovation, from South Korea's decades-old conglomerates still at the frontier to India's world-class talent that too often works abroad; from Europe's struggle to hold on to its best companies, to the deeper role of the state everywhere—including in Silicon Valley—and why the United States, far from declining, is extending its lead into a genuinely bipolar technological order. Mehran is a winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize. He attended Yale where he was a Fulbright Scholar, Fox International Fellow, and Teaching Fellow. He has been a Lead for the Digital Transformation of Industries at the World Economic Forum and an expert on Higher Education, Entrepreneurship, and Industrial Policy at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Before Yale, he studied at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He has been a visiting scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and a Fellow with the Acumen Fund.  You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The New Geography of Innovation. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  7. Sep 17

    Andrew Seth Meyer, "To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China, from Confucius to the First Emperor" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    The Warring States Period is one of the most important times in China’s history. It marked the end of one dynasty–the Zhou–and the beginning of a new imperial era, under the Qin. It’s an era that historian Andrew Seth Meyer describes as one of the most important revolutions in world history: The fall of the old aristocratic order, the birth of Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism, and the creation of the imperial system that would shape China for over two thousand years. Andrew has put together one of the first English comprehensive histories of the Warring States period in his new book To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China from Confucius to the First Emperor (Oxford UP, 2026) Andrew Seth Meyer is Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the author of The Dao of the Military: Liu An's Art of War and co-author of The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China.  You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of To Rule All Under Heaven. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.   Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  8. Sep 10

    Charlie Walker, "On Thin Ice: An Explorer's Memoir of Siberia, Surveillance and Survival" (Duckworth, 2026)

    In February 2022, British explorer Charlie Walker flew to Siberia's Sakha Republic to walk a thousand miles up frozen rivers to the Arctic Ocean, through Earth's coldest inhabited region. Days later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Tamping down his concerns, he continued on his journey, meeting indigenous people and ice road truckers along the way.  Yet his trip ended in fear and confusion, with an arrest and a month in a Yakutsk jail, the story of his new book, On Thin Ice: An Explorer's Memoir of Siberia, Surveillance and Survival (Duckworth, 2026) Charlie is an award-winning explorer, author and international keynote speaker. He has travelled over 60,000 miles by foot, horse, raft, bicycle, ski and dugout canoe, in places as varied as the Tibetan plateau, the Mongolian steppe, the Congolese jungle, the Arctic tundra, the highlands of New Guinea and the Sahara desert. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a Scientific Exploration Society Explorer Award winner, and the author of Through Sand & Snow (Nielsen UK: 2021) and On Roads That Echo (Nielsen UK: 2021) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of On Thin Ice. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

The Asian Review of Books is the only dedicated pan-Asian book review publication. Widely quoted, referenced, republished by leading publications in Asian and beyond and with an archive of more than two thousand book reviews, the ARB also features long-format essays by leading Asian writers and thinkers, excerpts from newly-published books and reviews of arts and culture. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

Information

  • Creator
    New Books Network
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    314
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © New Books Network
  • Show Website
    Asian Review of Books

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