The blurb on the front of this book, a quote from a review in the the Washington Post Book World, reads: … A strange tale of adventure and foreign travel [that] illuminates grand historical themes… Hu’s story, so deceptively simple, makes powerful reading… [A] splendid book.” That’s about as apt a soundbyte as possible. What […]
Kabuki is not for everyone. It’s a dark, vaguely SFnal epic about, well, sort of about the intricate connections between crime, empire, sexuality, and power in an imagined Japan which, unlike many inmagined futures, is definitely, clearly, and intelligently linked to real history. It’s dark. Dark, dark, dark. But it’s also beautifully drawn; it’s insightful, […]
When I ran across this little red book in a used bookshop in Saskatoon last summer, I snapped it up for one reason and one reason alone: because I remembered the title from this post by Adrian over at mssv.net. Now, if you look at the post I just linked above, you’ll see that the […]
It is impossible to read this book without a sense of looming doom faced by all the Russians you’re reading about. The first bit of text visible on the cover of this book reads, HOW RUSSIA LOST THE PACIFIC TO THE JAPANESE, and from that line onward, you know that the people Pleshakov is writing […]