Featured Books
Listening to Each Other’s Deep Story
Book review by Cynthia Burrell While neighbors, friends, and family members have turned away from one another in disgust or distrust in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on...
read moreMohsin Hamid rises to the occasion
Mohsin Hamid's second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), gained the Pakistani writer a measure of well-earned global notoriety and indicated the scope of both his ambition and his ability. But, really, it was only a jumping-off point. Hamid has a great deal...
read moreHatred Destroys Everyone
In the 1970s a military dictator, General Zia ul Haq, came to power in Pakistan by overthrowing a duly elected government. Very soon, he began a campaign to implement his intolerant vision of religion in the country. His decade-long reign started a descent for...
read moreWriting while riding: planning for a big bike ride
On a recent Saturday I packed up all the bike touring gear and loaded it into the panniers to simulate a bike ride on a fully-loaded touring rig. I wasn’t sure what I had brought on the last trip; then I remembered that I made a list of what I brought last time–and...
read moreReal News. Fake News. Manipulated News.
Over the last year or so, much has been written about the news and the role media should or should not have played in certain affairs of national import. This is clearly an important topic for the United States and the world, as well as for those responsible for...
read moreThe Death and Death of Great Chinese Cities
In the Epilogue to my Blue Ear Books title Live at the Forbidden City: Musical Encounters in China and Taiwan, I reflected ruefully that the China I'd described in the narrative, which had still retained much of its aesthetically rich pre‒twentieth century character,...
read moreThe trouble with Twitter
A few times in recent weeks I've found myself in tweet-exchanges that have descended quickly into intemperance and misunderstanding. In all cases, I could be accused with some justice of being overly sensitive and hair-trigger in my emotional and rhetorical reactions....
read moreRobert Pirsig: An Appreciation
When I took Freshman Composition at Azusa Pacific University back in 1986, we were required to read Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. I wasn’t much of a reader back then; if a book or magazine didn’t have pictures, I...
read morePower of Ridicule / Ridicule of Power
Blue Ear Books ringleader Ethan Casey recently asked if I had any thoughts to share on the current North Korea crisis, given my modicum of empirical expertise in things East Asian (see my BEB title Live at the Forbidden City). My initial reaction was "What do I know...
read moreErdogan’s Turkey – Trump’s America
Citizens of Turkey just voted in a referendum on whether to move from a parliamentary to a presidential system of democracy - one in which a great amount of power would be concentrated in the hands of one person, the duly elected president of the country. Turkey has...
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