Colonialism Archives - Page 2 of 11

What Could Be Saved by Liese O’Halloran Schwarz [in Booklist]

27 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost

Here’s where veteran narrator Lisa Flanagan excels: unflaggingly individualizing myriad varied characters. Here’s where she disappoints: stumbling over non-English words and using a grating French accent. Quibbles aside, Flanagan consistently, remarkably maintains distinct voices for the peripatetic Preston family in Liese O'Halloran Schwarz’s (The Possible...

Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho [in Booklist]

26 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Hapa/Mixed-race, Korean, Korean American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW “In my lifetime, I’ve had at least three mothers,” Grace M. Cho writes. After surviving the Korean War, Cho’s mother worked as a bar girl at a U.S. naval base during the U.S. occupation of South Korea. In 1971, she married Cho’s father, a...

Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town by Barbara Demick [in Booklist]

15 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, Tibetan

Let’s just agree that Casandra Campbell is not fluent in any Asian languages – which makes her an odd (mis)casting choice for a title set mostly in Tibet, populated by mostly Tibetan characters. That said, lauded journalist Barbara Demick’s extraordinary latest is a book to...

Trout, Belly Up by Rodrigo Fuentes, translated by Ellen Jones [in Shelf Awareness]

29 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Latin American, Repost, Short Stories, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Not until the last of this ingenious seven-story collection do readers get the most intimate glimpse of Don Henrik, and even then, only through the lens of his not-quite stepson. Henrik, however, is the single connecting character in Rodrigo Fuentes's U.S. debut, Trout, Belly...

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop [in Shelf Awareness]

30 Nov, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, European, Fiction, French, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Spare and devastating, At Night All Blood Is Black by French Senegalese author David Diop is a bone-chilling anti-war treatise. He chooses as backdrop a little-known chapter of World War I annals, when the French government drafted some 200,000 soldiers from its colonies, including Senegal....

The Mermaid from Jeju by Sumi Hahn [in Booklist]

23 Nov, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Korean American, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, Junja was a “real” mermaid, a Korean haenyeo – one of the world-renowned freediving women who gather sea life – of Jeju Island. By 2001, she’s spent most of her life as “a pillar of the Korean American community in...

Algériennes: The Forgotten Women of the Algerian Revolution by Swann Meralli, illustrated by Deloupy, translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger [in Booklist]

29 Sep, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, European, Fiction, French, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Repost, Translation

While reading about the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), contemporary French woman Beatrice learns she has a specific label: she’s an “enfant d’appelé,” literally “a child of one called up” to serve in the Algerian War. Her father was such a soldier, but he’s never...

Apeirogon by Colum McCann [in Booklist]

11 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Biography, Fiction, Irish American, Israeli, Middle Eastern, Nonfiction, Palestinian, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW When Colum McCann first considered narrating his books, he offered to audition for his own National Book Awarded Let the Great World Spin: “...

Paying the Land by Joe Sacco [in Booklist]

22 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Canadian, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Native American/First Nations/Indigenous Peoples, Nonfiction, Repost

Best known for his Palestine books – most notably, Footnotes in Gaza (2010) – frequent Eisner Award-winner Joe Sacco’s nonfiction titles share essential overlapping features: talking heads given agency to speak their truths, exquisitely detailed artwork, meticulously revealed events. Here Sacco heads to Canada’s Northwest Territories, home...

People of the City by Cyprian Ekwensi [in Shelf Awareness]

07 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Fiction, Repost

Although Chinua Achebe's pivotal Things Fall Apart is a staple on most Western students' reading lists as representative of modern African literature, Cyprian Ekwensi predates Achebe by four years as one of Nigeria's first writers publishing in English. Introduced in the U.K. in 1954, Ekwensi's debut...

Glorious Boy by Aimee Liu [in Library Journal]

04 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, British, Chinese American, Fiction, Hapa/Mixed-race, Indian, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Liu’s eponymous “glorious boy” exists at the intersection of families, communities, countries, cultures – and, for a while, life and death. His spirited, adventurous parents – Shep, a British doctor obsessed with the healing power of indigenous plants, and the American Claire, a would-be...

The Immortals of Tehran by Ali Araghi [in Shelf Awareness]

28 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Iranian, Iranian American, Persian, Persian American, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Ali Araghi begins his prodigious debut novel with a literal bang: once upon a time in an apple orchard, a returning soldier urges his rifle into his son's hands, forcing the boy to shoot him. The shocking tragedy renders 10-year-old Ahmad mute, and has...

Tropic of Violence by Nathacha Appanah, translated by Geoffrey Strachan [in Booklist]

06 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Fiction, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW How can a story so harrowing, so wrenching be so gorgeous? In her third novel exquisitely translated by award-winning Geoffrey Strachan, Mauritius-born journalist and translator Nathacha Appanah (Waiting for Tomorrow, 2018) presents the beginning and dissolution of a boy, Moïse, and all the people...

Last Boat Out of Shanghai by Helen Zia + Author Interview [in Bloom]

10 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Author Interview/Profile, Chinese, Chinese American, Nonfiction, Repost

“We have to learn from history and stop repeating its mistakes” As the child of two Chinese refugees, Helen Zia can personally speak to the effects of displacement, separation, adaptation, and reinvention. In her memorable career as activist/journalist/writer/Asian American icon, Zia turns inward for the first time in...

All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy [in Booklist]

06 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Indian, Repost, South Asian

In his mid-60s, Myshkin is finally about to understand what he’s been yearning to know almost his entire life. Since age 9, he’s been “known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman,” never mind that he is actually German. Except for...

Those Who Knew by Idra Novey [in Booklist]

05 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost

“In the aging port city of an island nation near the start of the new millennium,” Idra Novey (Ways to Disappear) introduces her taut, haunting novel, giving it a foreboding sense of taking place anywhere close, anytime near. Student activist Maria P. has been dead...

The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo [in Booklist]

27 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Malaysian, Repost

After making her author and narrator debut with The Ghost Bride (2014), Yangsze Choo reprises her double-duty with this equally intriguing sophomore title. With her crisp, British colonial inflections, Choo is her own ideal reader, knowing exactly how her characters should sound. Set in 1930s British...

Bone Talk by Candy Gourlay [in Shelf Awareness]

13 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in British Asian, Fiction, Filipina/o, Middle Grade Readers, Repost, Southeast Asian

Growing up in the Philippines, Candy Gourlay (Tall Story) "wondered why all the books she'd ever loved didn't resemble her steamy, tropical home in Manila." As she explains in her author bio, it took years as a journalist and author for Gourlay, who now lives...

The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali [in Booklist]

04 Nov, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Iranian, Iranian American, Persian, Persian American, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Adroitly adapting her deep, mellifluous voice across continents, decades, ages, and genders, Mozhan Marnò flawlessly embodies Marjan Kamali’s (Together Tea, 2013) stupendous sophomore title about young lovers torn apart by class, politics, and history during the violent tumult of 1950s Iran. A Tehran stationery...

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell [in Booklist]

31 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Audio, Black/African American, Fiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Not far from the Zambezi River’s Victoria Falls, a fin-de-siècle colonial settlement called the Old Drift was the site of a loosely described “hotel,” where a colliding incident in 1904 combines the fates of three families originally Italian, British, would-be-Zambian – for a century-plus...

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