Taomo Zhou, “Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2019)
If tales of China’s radical ‘opening up’ to the world over the last 30 years imply that the country was somehow ‘closed’ before this, then one need only think of Beijing’s dalliances with various pote...
17 Dec 20191h 8min
Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019)
Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-Pros...
25 Nov 20191h 14min
Appeasement Eighty Years On
According to one dictionary definition, the term means: “to yield or concede to the belligerent demands of (a nation, group, person, etc.) in a conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of justice...
18 Nov 201953min
Aurélie Basha i Novosejt, "I Made Mistakes: Robert McNamara's Vietnam War Policy, 1960-1968 (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Speaking to an advisor in 1966 about America's escalation of forces in Vietnam, American Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara confessed: 'We've made mistakes in Vietnam … I've made mistakes. But th...
4 Nov 201955min
Bruce Riedel, "Beirut 1958: How America's Wars in the Middle East Began" (Brookings, 2019)
In July 1958, U.S. Marines stormed the beach in Beirut, Lebanon, ready for combat. Farcically. they were greeted by vendors and sunbathers. Fortunately, the rest of their mission—helping to end Lebano...
1 Nov 201936min
Michael Mandelbaum, "The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth" (Oxford UP, 2019)
In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford Univiersity Press, 2019), the eminent foreign policy scholar Michael...
24 Okt 201955min
Matthew A. Sutton, "Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War" (Basic Books, 2019)
What makes a good missionary makes a good spy. Or so thought "Wild" Bill Donovan when he secretly recruited a team of religious activists for the Office of Strategic Services. They entered into a worl...
17 Okt 201928min
Nianshen Song, "Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881-1919” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Land borders in East Asia have played just as big a role in the region’s social transformations as their more recently debated maritime counterparts, and the boundary between China and Korea offers pa...
17 Okt 20191h
