Podcast · Arts & Books

Asian Review of Books

by New Books Network · English · Arts & Books

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 thin

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 44 min
Latest: 8 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

8 Oct 2026 · 41 min

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,…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E309 · 1 Oct 2026 · 39 min
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.…
E308 · 24 Sep 2026 · 39 min
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…
E306 · 17 Sep 2026 · 52 min
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…
E307 · 10 Sep 2026 · 48 min
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…
E305 · 3 Sep 2026 · 50 min
Jieun Baek, "Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness" (Yale UP, 2026)
What do the people closest to power really think about the system they serve? That’s perhaps one of the most important questions one could ask about North Korea, still one of the world’s least understood countries. Today, we’re joined by Jieun Baek, author of Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness (Yale UP, 2026). She draws on in-depth interviews with North Korean elite escapees—from senior party cadres and diplomats to military officers and wealthy, politically connected figures—to explore a group often assumed to be secure,…
E304 · 27 Aug 2026 · 45 min
Yuri Pines, "China's Aristocratic Age: Politics and Power in the Springs-and-Autumns Period" (Princeton UP, 2026)
The Springs-and-Autumns period is a strange period in Chinese history. Coming after the decline of the Zhou, and before the famous Warring States Period, this period of Chinese history features a large number of small states with no powerful hegemon, no strong sense of the mandate of heaven, rules of chivalry that wouldn’t seem out of place in medieval Europe, and roles passed down through lineage–and not awarded on the basis of merit. Historian Yuri Pines calls this period China’s "aristocratic age” in his book titled, appropriately, China's Aristocratic Age: Politics and Power in the…
E303 · 20 Aug 2026 · 41 min
Sandip Roy, "Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal" (Seagull Books, 2026)
Chapal Rani was one of India’s most famous performers of jatra, Bengal’s popular theater. Traditionally, all the roles, including female roles, were played by men—and Chapal Rani was perhaps the most prominent performer of women on the stage. He’s also the subject of a new book from Sandip Roy, titled Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal. Roy, who joins us the show today, tells the story of Chapal Rani’s life, from stardom to obscurity and later rediscovery; how Chapal Rani would transform himself every night onstage; and how jatra changes how we talk about gender and performance. Sandip…
E302 · 13 Aug 2026 · 51 min
Paul French, "The Last Emperor of China: Twilight of the Forbidden City" (St. Martin's Press, 2026)
The life of Puyi, the last emperor of China, often feels like a spectacle—in no small part due to the 1987 Oscar-winning film The Last Emperor. Yet the true story being Puyi, as well as his wife, the empress Wanrong, is more complicated. Two foreigners were asked to tutor both Puyi and Wanrong: Reginald Johnston and Isabel Ingram, both of whom provide fresh insights into how China’s final emperor and empress lived their lives. Historian Paul French draws upon these sources, and others, for his latest work: The Last Emperor of China: Twilight of the Forbidden City (St. Martin's Press, 2026)…
E301 · 6 Aug 2026 · 43 min
Tom Lin, "Babylon, South Dakota" (Little, Brown and Co, 2026)
Today, we’re welcoming novelist Tom Lin back to the show, whose new novel Babylon, South Dakota (Little, Brown and Company: 2026) moves his fascination with the American West into stranger and more uncanny territory. A Chinese family moves to a new farm in South Dakota; after the government takes an interest in a plot near their home for some Cold War-era experiments, the family’s life gets much odder, and much stranger. Babylon, South Dakota’s Cold War setting gives the novel a chance to explore nuclear dread, government conspiracies, and even an interest in the paranormal that’s…
E300 · 30 Jul 2026 · 55 min
Joe Ngai and Nick Leung, "The Next China Is Still China: An Insider's Playbook for Winning in the New Era" (Scribner, 2026)
What’s going on in the Chinese economy? China reported GDP growth of just 4.3% last quarter. Consumption is sluggish, exports are booming, electronics manufacturers and chipmakers are reporting huge profits as car sales slump. Joe Ngai and Nick Leung dive into the Chinese economy in their latest book The Next China Is Still China: An Insider's Playbook for Winning in the New Era (Scribner, 2026), which came out earlier this year. The book is motivated by a question many executives asked amid new U.S. tariffs and COVID-driven supply shocks: Is there another economy that can replace China’s…
E299 · 23 Jul 2026 · 49 min
Eamonn Gearon, "The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain's Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit" (Hurst, 2026)
Many of us have watched the classic 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, the somewhat fictionalized work based on the life of T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt and the First World War. But Lawrence was part of the Arab Bureau, an effort to better understand and influence the region as Britain fought the Ottoman Empire for control of the Middle East. Chastened by their intelligence failures at Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara, the British tried to do something unthinkable: Actually learn how local communities operated, and ensure that propaganda was culturally authentic. It’s the subject of The Arab…
E298 · 16 Jul 2026 · 38 min
Matthew Campbell, "The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy" (Penguin, 2026)
On June 10, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returned two pieces of artwork to Cambodia: an Angkor statue and a sandstone lintel. It’s the latest repatriation effort by the U.S.’s premier art museum, and the third time the Met has had to give up Cambodian artifacts specifically. Matthew Campbell’s The Man Who Stole The Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy (Penguin, 2026) dives into the story of the Cambodian antiquities trade, from looted temples in the Cambodian forests, through dealers in Bangkok like Douglas Latchford, and then into museums and…
E297 · 9 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 12 min
Gregory Smits, "The Ryukyu Islands: A New History from the Stone Age to the Present" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Most people only know one of the Ryukyu Islands: the island of Okinawa, home to sandy beaches and one of the U.S.’s most important bases in Asia. There are lots of myths about this island chain, which stretch from southern Japan down to the island of Taiwan: That it owed loyalty to China, given its place in the imperial tribute trade; that it was a pacifist kingdom; that it was quasi-sovereign even within Japan. Gregory Smits tackles a lot of these myths in his expansive history of the islands, titled The Ryukyu Islands: A New History from the Stone Age to the Present (University of Chicago…
E296 · 2 Jul 2026 · 52 min
Olivier Hein, "Mother of the World: The Remarkable History of Turkmenistan" (Hurst, 2026)
Turkmenistan rarely makes international headlines–and when it did, it was often stories that highlighted things like the strange cult of personality that surrounded Saparmurat Niyazov, its first post-Soviet president, who named months after himself and made his memoir required reading. Olivier Hein joins us on the show today to talk about Turkmenistan’s long history: as a possible origin for Zoroastrianism, the first monotheistic faith; the rise of Merv, at one point possibly one of the world’s largest cities; the emergence of the Turkmen; and how this region ended up becoming the…
E295 · 25 Jun 2026 · 32 min
Xiaobing Li, "China’s Mahan: Admiral Liu Huaqing and the Rise of the Modern Chinese Navy (Naval Institute Press, 2026)
In 2012, China debuted its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, a refurbished Soviet-era ship from Ukraine. The debut of the Liaoning was largely thanks to a longtime pressure campaign by Liu Huaqing, the onetime leader of the People’s Liberation Army Navy and the man responsible for transforming China’s naval strategy. (China now has three carriers, and is building a fourth). When Liu began his career, China saw its military victories as coming primarily via land warfare; Liu, over decades, forced China to take naval combat seriously. Xiaobing Li writes about Liu’s life in his book China’s…
E294 · 18 Jun 2026 · 44 min
Charlotte Brooks, "The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution" (U California Press, 2026)
The story of the Moy family—U.S.-born Chinese-American siblings who grow up in the first half of the 20th century—is one that spans the Pacific, covering New York, Chicago, and cosmopolitan Shanghai. It’s a story that spans the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War, and the early Cold War—and stars one sibling who was an early participant in the Kuomintang…and another who records propaganda for Germany and Japan during the Second World War. In her new book, The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution (University of…
E293 · 11 Jun 2026 · 42 min
Robert Templer, "The Shah's Party: And the Iranian Revolution That Followed (Hurst, 2026)
In 1971, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi threw a party to celebrate the 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian Empire. It was planned to be a massive party, with tents set up in the desert, and invitations sent to just about every world leader across both the Western and Soviet blocs. Robert Templer writes about this celebration–and how it presaged the events of the Iranian Revolution of 1979–in his new book The Shah's Party: And the Iranian Revolution That Followed (Hurst, 2026). Robert Templer is a writer and former professor at the Central European University, where he also founded a research…
E292 · 4 Jun 2026 · 58 min
Homa Katouzian, "Iran and the Revolution: A History" (Yale UP, 2026)
Iran is, once again, in global headlines, following U.S. strikes on the country earlier this year. Operation Epic Fury, as the Department of Defense called it, is the latest twist in Iran’s modern history, starting from the coup that brought the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power, through the 1956 coup against Mossadegh and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, to the present day’s tensions over Iran’s nuclear program. Homa Katouzian looks at this history in his latest book Iran and the Revolution: A History (Yale University Press, 2026), where he posits that Iran is a “short-term society,” one that…
E291 · 28 May 2026 · 41 min
Shefalee Vasudev, "Stories We Wear: Status, Spectacle and the Politics of Appearance" (Westland Non-Fiction, 2025)
Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, is known for his outfits. Since rising to become India’s head of government in 2014, photographers and journalists have long followed his clothing styles, each saying something about India. It’s part of a long tradition of using clothing to make a statement about India—and about defining a political brand. Nor is it unique to India–remember Obama’s tan suit, or now the MAGA red cap? That observation is part of Shefalee Vasudev’s recent book Stories We Wear: Status, Spectacle and The Politics of Appearance (Westland Non-Fiction, 2025), where she dives…
E290 · 21 May 2026 · 49 min
Evelyn Iritani, "Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II" (FSG, 2026)
In October 1943, the Gripsholm—a Swedish ocean liner—and the Teia Maru—a Japanese troop ship—sat in Mormugao, a port in Portuguese India. There, the two ships exchanged their passengers: Allied civilians stuck in Japanese territory after Pearl Harbor , and an assortment of Japanese, Japanese-American, and other Japanese-ethnic people from the Americas.The trade capped a long and fraught diplomatic exchange between the U.S. and Japan, two countries at war. Evelyn Iritani’s book Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese…
E289 · 14 May 2026 · 32 min
Fyodor Tertitskiy, "Pyongyang on the Brink: Sixteen Crises That Shaped North Korea" (Hurst, 2026)
North Korea has survived wars, sanctions, and isolation—to the point where it now seems that the continuation of the Kim dynasty, and a starkly divided Korea, is assured. But history is filled with events where some change might have drastically altered how a country’s development might have gone. North Korea is no different, at least according to Fyodor Tertitskiy, author of Pyongyang on the Brink: Sixteen Crises That Shaped North Korea (Hurst, 2026). In his book, he posits sixteen different points where things might have gone differently. Maybe Japan falls too quickly in the Second World…
E288 · 7 May 2026 · 42 min
Julia Stephens, "Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire" (Princeton UP, 2025)
The British Empire covered much of the world during the 19th century–and each time someone moved through it, they left a paper trail in their wake. Julia Stephens, the author of Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire (Princeton UP, 2025), uses that archive of documents to try to piece together the stories of Indian migrants that traveled the empire throughout their lives–and, in some cases, after their lives were over. Julia joins us today to talk about her book and her attempt to find a different approach to studying these histories: Figures like Kuala Lumpur…
E287 · 30 Apr 2026 · 48 min
Paul Blustein, "King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World's Dominant Currency" (Yale UP, 2025)
The U.S. dollar is the world’s most important currency. Trade is priced in dollars, the world’s central banks keep U.S. dollars in reserve, some places–including my home of Hong Kong, peg their currencies to the dollar. But what explains the U.S. dollar’s success? And why have some challengers, like the Japanese yen or the Chinese yuan, failed to gain traction? Paul Blustein, author of King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World's Dominant Currency, joins us on the show today; the book was released last year, and is now in paperback. In his book, Paul talks about how the U.S. dollar got to…
E286 · 23 Apr 2026 · 44 min
Craig Perry, "Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History" (Princeton UP, 2026)
Slavery was a key part of pre-modern Islamic society, spanning from soldiers to concubines. And one of the most revealing repositories of evidence we have for how slavery worked in practice comes from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of hundreds of thousands of discarded documents from a medieval synagogue in Cairo. Craig Perry examined these documents for his new book: Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History (Princeton University Press, 2026). The book dives into everyday documents, like wills and manumission deeds, to reconstruct how Jewish households in Egypt bought, sold, owned and…
E285 · 16 Apr 2026 · 42 min
Jinwoo Park, "Oxford Soju Club" (Dundurn Press, 2025)
Doha, a North Korean spymaster, is found stabbed in an alley in Oxford. Doha tells his mentee–another North Korean spy named Yohan—to go to the Oxford Soju Club, a restaurant in the British college town. That starts a dance between three different Koreans: Yohan; Jihoon, the South Korean owner of the Soju Club; and Yunah, a Korean-American recruited to weed out Yonah. Oxford Soju Club (Dundurn Press, 2025), the debut novel from Jinwoo Park, uses this spy thriller setting to explore ideas of history, migration and identity. Jinwoo Park is a Korean Canadian writer based in Montreal. He…
E284 · 9 Apr 2026 · 39 min
Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Panini’s Ashtadyayi is one of the most famous works in Sanskrit, a so-called “linguistic machine” that, through its 4,000 words, allows someone to generate words and grammar. Generations of commentators have tried to figure out exactly how to best interpret the work and explain its various contradictions and overlapping instructions. Then, in 2022, Rishi Rajpopat, a PhD student at Cambridge, said he’d figured out how to unravel Panini’s work to create a cohesive set of rules–and potentially wiped away centuries of commentary. The announcement made headlines (and led to some grumbling among…
E283 · 2 Apr 2026 · 47 min
Avner Greif et al., "Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000" (Princeton UP, 2025)
It’s one of the biggest questions in economic history: How did a richer, more advanced China fall behind Europe? Why was Europe the home of the Industrial Revolution, and not China? And what does that journey tell us about politics and culture? In Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000 (Princeton UP, 2025), Guido Tabellini, alongside his co-authors, argues that the answer comes from how European and Chinese organized cooperation—through corporations in Europe and through clans in China—and how that shaped each one’s society. Guido Tabellini is the…
E282 · 26 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 7 min
Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, "The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War" (Oxford UP, 2025)
On Feb. 6, 1945, just three days after the U.S. army started to fight the Japanese in the city of Manila, General Douglas MacArthur declared that “Manila had fallen.” In truth, the battle would take another month, as U.S. forces fought their way through block after block. By the end of the battle, which featured some of the most intense urban fighting faced by the U.S. army, Manila was in ruins, the old walled city of Intramuros was flattened, and 100,000 Filipino civilians were dead. Nicholas Evan Sarantakes writes a comprehensive history of the fighting in The Battle of Manila: Poisoned…
E281 · 19 Mar 2026 · 35 min
Mahesh Rao, "Half Light" (Penguin Random House India, 2025)
On Sep. 6, 2018, India’s Supreme Court ruled that Section 377, a law that criminalized consensual homosexual activity, was unconstitutional, reversing an earlier decision from 2013. Both news headlines and LGBT activists hailed the decision as a major step forward for same-sex rights in India. But in Mahesh Rao’s new novel Half Light (Penguin Random House India, 2025), the court’s deliberations sit in the background behind the budding relationship between Pavan, a hotel worker in Darjeeling, and Neville, a young, confident student. They meet first in Pavan’s hotel in Darjeeling in 2014;…

About Asian Review of Books

Asian Review of Books is a English arts & books podcast from New Books Network. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: New Books Network
Language: English
Category: Arts & Books
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 44 min
Latest episode: 8 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1546369258
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