Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2021 -

This engaging, detailed, beautifully illustrated, and quite honestly unputdownable volume presents an ethnographic history of food culture in Central Asia. The high quality of the research is sure to engage anyone with a personal connection to the region, but the addition of etymological asides, connections beyond the region, historical narratives, and the copious and mouthwateringly practicable recipes make this a book that could well spend more time in the kitchen than on the desk. The five sections address the place of foodways in Central Asian culture, the prehistory and history of foodways in the region, historical interactions between travelers and ideas (including food as medicine) from outside the region, a regional overview of contemporary food and foodways, and the foods of individual countries. The four editors employ their diverse fields--food history, ethnography, medicine, human ecology, art, and cultural studies--to offer a multilayered exploration of how food is used in different ways across Central Asia, as well as the historical and cultural contexts that surround individual foods. The illustrations are many, the bibliography is broad and deep, and the index is comprehensive. A delicious book.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels.

Russo offers a necessary corrective to the common understanding of a pivotal event in China's Cultural Revolution: its prologue. By challenging received historiographical wisdom in the West and in China, he highlights the complexities, rather than the caricatures, of the revolution. Instead of the well-worn accounts of violence and disorder, readers learn about the intellectual history of the Cultural Revolution, an event that asked big questions about the socialist revolutionary project. These included what the political role of the peasantry should be after a socialist movement seizes control of the government, and how a socialist state would avoid sliding into a capitalist system again (a worry for Mao Zedong). Russo begins his account with a well-known controversy surrounding a famous Chinese opera that featured a Ming dynasty bureaucrat who opposed corruption and, in the opera's interpretation, fought sincerely for a grateful peasantry. This brilliant opening microhistory allows Russo to tie together an analysis that crosses the disciplinary lines of history, sociological theory, and Marxism. A model of historical inquiry that should be read by those interested in modern Chinese and East Asian history and revolutionary movements in general.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

This interesting and informative volume edited by Liu (Fudan Univ., China) and Pezzullo (Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) seeks to illustrate how environmental communication in China deserves increased scholarly attention, not only in China but in the US and beyond, both for its exceptionality and for being indicative of the contemporary global landscape. The collection includes an introduction, eight chapters split across three parts, a conclusion, and a postscript. Part 1 focuses on themes of care as it relates to animals, places, and activities that bring people joy. Part 2 examines crisis relating to environmental issues, and part 3 investigates futurity. The conclusion and postscript aim to set an agenda for classrooms, research, and policy in relation to environmental communication. As the editors state, "international and cross-cultural practices, stories, models, and solutions" need to be considered if there is any hope of "build[ing] a sense of environmental care that matches the ever-growing scope of the crises we face." They further note that "green public cultures in China and beyond emphasize imagination, reflection, and the mutual learning that makes collaboration possible."Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; two-year program students.

Modestly intended as a synthesis of existing scholarship on the history of Chinese law, this book represents a highly original undertaking, beneficial to both students and scholars of China. An accomplished author of many works, including Trial of Modernity (CH, Apr'09, 46-4673), Xu (Christopher Newport Univ.) here adumbrates and expounds on the long evolution of law and justice in China from 221 BCE through the post-Mao eras under Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping. If the span of time Heaven Has Eyes covers is comprehensive, attesting to Xu's unrivaled expertise on the subject, so is its content, which includes many specific and intriguing details, ranging from the emancipation of concubines in the early 20th century to the prosecution of "naked officials" a century later. Broken down into four periods, Xu's text masterfully weaves together a coherent narrative that charts the ups and downs of the Chinese legal system in the longue duree. His argument is equally cogent: despite the notable changes of the period, the Chinese understanding of legal justice is one that expects to align with "Heavenly reason, state law, and human relations." This is a tour de force.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Medcalf (Australian National Univ., former diplomat and intelligence analyst) has written the best book on the region, in this reader's view, offering indispensable basics on the relevant geography, history, economics, strategy. and national interests. First, Medcalf demonstrates that Indo-Pacific, a term in growing use since 2000, is an old yet valid construct, far superior to the usual "East Asia" or "Asia Pacific." The Chinese and Japanese economies both would stall without traversing the Indian Ocean. He adopts a realist view of China's economic and military--especially naval--expansionism: they will not be talked out of it. Beijing may lack a single master plan but shifts among commercial, strategic, and political tools to expand its influence. Through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) China loans massively to develop ports across the region. When debts cannot be repaid, the ports become de facto Chinese naval bases. To offset Chinese expansionism, Medcalf urges "Quad" powers--the US, Japan, India, and Australia--to practice solidarity and resilience aimed at establishing coexistence with China. In taking this position he parallels (but is less optimistic than) fellow Australian Hugh White in his earlier The China Choice (CH, Jun'14, 51-5837), which advocated peaceful co-dominion over the region's seas. Readable and usable for advanced undergraduate courses, the book is essential for professionals.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals.

Formichi (Cornell Univ.) here provides a wonderfully dynamic book. It is an innovative, pioneering historical survey; a well-designed, excellent textbook; and it is certainly adequate to serve as a concise reference book. The author expertly expands on Richard Bulliet's Islam: The View from the Edge (CH, Sep'94, 32-0249), but goes further than he did toward displacing an uncritical assumption that Arab Islam is somehow "a golden standard of purity and authenticity" (p. 270), in contrast to presumably less authentic or derivative forms of Muslim life and thought, as developed in regions of Asia, for instance. The span of centuries and range of Asian regions within command of Formichi's scholarship is remarkable, and she incorporates now-standard work by leading regional historians such as Barbara D. Metcalf on South Asia. In short, this book is no mere generalist's effort to produce an easily digestible synoptic history. It is a foundational work that points the way toward what could become a new generation of creative and urgently needed studies. Boxed key points, lists for further reading by chapter, a glossary, extensive citations and notes, and an analytic index round out this noteworthy volume.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

The literature on the war in Vietnam includes hundreds of first-person sources by men on all sides in the conflict, but fewer than a dozen books about women are in print. Thus this collection of oral history interviews by Norland (formerly, US Department of State) is an important contribution. Norland focuses on a particular coterie of female peers educated at Lycee Marie Curie, the elite girls school in Saigon that served the daughters of Vietnamese who worked for the French. These privileged women were sisters in the cause of resistance who all engaged in resistance activities during the late 1940s and 1950s, some continuing throughout the entire wartime period. The individual stories are illuminating. While some of Norland's subjects functioned under cover in society, others went into the field to assist the guerillas in a number of ways. While many of these highly educated students of the arts provided morale-building by presenting plays, musical performances, and poetry readings for the troops, others performed manual labor. All paid heavy costs in their own lives. Norland's interviews, conducted over a 30-year period (1988 to 2018), reveal reflection and introspection, poignancy and sadness, particularly regarding events transpiring after the "liberation" of 1975 through their retirement years. This is a well-written, incredibly valuable book.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. General readers.

A veteran scholar of the Eurasian worlds, Spruyt (Northwestern Univ.) tackles the long misread, shared history of the great empires of the early modern world. Taking the necessary interdisciplinary tract to explore the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman empires in relation to their Southeast Asian counterparts and the Sinocentric tributary system dominating parts of Asia, this book offers an invaluable contrastive register of global history. In order to argue against Eurocentric methods of analyzing the modern state system, that is, the Westphalian order, Spruyt highlights how these Asian societies functioned on principles of social, political, and economic order that were both uniquely their own and part of the larger dialogue at play in the period. As multiethnic empires, the regimes covered throughout proved adaptive to contingencies emerging from constant territorial expansion, revealing a capacity to accommodate "difference" and thrive in conditions of heterogeneity that were anathema in the modern nation-state emerging in Western Europe. Offering readers a rich, distinctive approach to accounting for how non-European systems functioned in relation to engagements with the West, this book upsets conventional wisdom about the formation of modernity and its hegemonic hold over the rest of the world.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.