Fool

Very straightforward and, for me, useful read. Due to the huge coverage, inevitably some areas get far too little coverage.

An interesting, provocative, and as always with Moyn, a beautifully written book. The scope of the argument is a lot less than the title might suggest, and its constituent parts could have told a more cohesive story. There was not enough engagement with the variety of literature on this already.

This book is getting a bit long in the tooth now as a lot of Taiwanese scholarship has been published on the 2/28 incident since it came out. It is remarkable for its unusual attempt to present the various arguments in a “balanced” way. The effect ultimately didn't really work out that way however.

I felt there was considerably more coverage of Taiwanese violence against mainlanders in the early stages of the incident than on the much larger scale of violence by the Chinese military in the oppression of the incident. Since more recent descriptions usually err on the opposite side however, this can complement other accounts.

I am not persuaded by their argument about the low number of security forces on the island compared to the Japanese being a reason for the scale of the incident. They clump Japanese military and security forces together and compare these numbers to security plus military forces of the Chinese. What they don't mention is that the numbers of police/gendarmerie remains almost constant into the postwar. Obviously if there had been more soldiers in Taiwan, the uprising may have been put down more quickly but since some of the worst violence by Chinese forces was carried out by Peng's forces already in Taiwan, it is not clear that it would have resulted in fewer deaths or less oppression.

I'm not entirely sure if the overly dramatic and emotional way in which this book was presented is more due to the narrator or the author and the selections chosen by the author. Either way I was disappointed with this book.

It addresses an interesting and important topic and while I generally have no objections to narrative histories which make extensive use of contemporary sources to help tell the story, the effect here was counter productive. In the case of the worst chapters, it seems the author completely gave up any attempt at analysis or explanation, threw up hands in despair and gave the reader a long string of inflammatory articles from newspapers of the time designed to spark the appropriate feelings of disgust.

The universal discrimination, violent acts of terror, and reprehensible views held by many of the Southern protagonists all deserve mention and quotation, but the assemblage of characters and their portrayal came across in such a polarizing and unbalanced way this book cannot but anger and disgust anyone who might have some sympathies for the predicament of defeated southerners in the aftermath of the civil war. The result may unfortunately lead to the opposite of the desired effect: many people for whom a book of this topic would be an ideal read will be completely put off not only this work but the whole topic.

Another frustrating aspect of this book was that less than half of the book focuses on the terror itself. We get long, rambling, and often completely irrelevant looks at the lives and loves of the “heroes” of the story, using valuable space in the book that might have been better dedicated to understanding the character of southern society, economy, and the origins and rise of a culture of discrimination and violence.

A central question in the various essays of the book is “When did Japan/China become Japan/China” - Some really great scholars, including the editor Fogel, Eiko Ikegami, William C. Kirby, David L. Howell, Peter Perdue etc. all offer their thoughts and bring their years of research to their responses.

A wonderful anti-nationalist “mythbuster” book which deconstructs every major myth of the Norwegian nationalist historical narrative while promoting a view of history based on the idea of “The world in Norway and Norway in the world.”

I was particularly fond of the sections on Danish rule in Norway and the “1800s battle for Norway's soul.”

The efforts of this book mirror attempts being made by historians all over the world to confront nationalist narratives.

Memoir of McLogan. Includes a chapter on his postwar assignment to Korea. There are some interesting moments throughout. Unfortunately, McLogan includes a lot of general historical narrative from other sources so that the reader will get more of a macroscopic picture of what is going on. While some readers unfamiliar with Korea or its history may be interested, this means that we are left with relatively little in the way of his own experiences and anecdotes, especially in the postwar chapters I was most interested in. Given how hard it is to find good accounts of Korea from 1945-1950, it was thus somewhat of a disappointment.

Some of my favorite quotes from the work.

“I don't think they appreciated us burning the rice to keep war, but then, we did get rid of the Japanese overlords so their standard of living had to improve.”

“One day we went down to the town and practiced village fighting maneuvers, much to the consternation of the villagers.”

“I think it was the combination of kimchi and fecal matter which made the town smell so rank.” (Kunsan)

Somewhat dry and mostly political narrative of the Indonesian Revolution. Surprising that, given the detailed topic, there was a lot less focus on specific groups and people, or even more general abstract analysis of the “gangsters” (this term is not sufficiently problematized) or their relationship to the revolutionaries.

However, given there is not a whole lot on this topic out there, as far as I know, it was still informative to someone such as myself who has much to learn about this particular troubling period of postcolonial Indonesia.

This translation of Yu Yonghe's writings from his trip to Taiwan in the 17th century is great for those interested in Taiwan, in Qing dynasty travel literature and in Qing perceptions of non-Chinese (including Westerners).

The book can be read quickly and different parts of the journal entries by Yu Yonghe will be interesting to different people.

The translation strikes me as a bit too literal but that will be appreciated by more scholarly readers who may want to consult the original.

This book is essentially a collection of anecdotes about the last Manchu emperor Puyi by his last wife Li Shuxian. Though it is filled with tempting photographs depicting his life as emperor and later Japanese puppet, the text mainly covers his final years in the 1960s.

It is difficult to gauge how much we are to trust the contents. It is easily apparent that Puyi, and his wife, became important vehicles of Communist propaganda after he was released from Fushun prison and developed ties to Zhou Enlai. She rarely strays from depictions of him as a thoroughly reformed, if scatterbrained, lover of China's new liberation. The only time she contradicts this is in her depiction of him as a daring voice willing to stand up for his friends when they came under attack during the cultural revolution. She offers almost unbelievable stories of his complete inability to perform simple daily tasks. These are difficult to buy since she met him years after his long imprisonment.

The book had enough interesting anecdotes to make a few hours in the airport pass, and it is interesting to find out how much he was coddled by Communist government officials in his final years and used as an ideal reformed citizen of the New China. However, unsurprisingly given the editor and origins of the work, the book seems rather lazily compiled and doesn't try much to explore more critically some of the more issues involved in his life.

Another soldier McLogan's memoir “Boy Soldier: Coming of Age During World War II” also has two chapters on life in the same 63rd Infantry Regiment (6th Infantry Division) in Kunsan, South Korea and is a good book for comparison. Ottoboni's memoir is hands down, much better. His recollections of his days stationed in Kunsan are filled with much greater personal detail, including frequent extended quotations from his letters of the time, and thus offers the reader with a much richer range of material from the personal experiences of a single soldier.

Unfortunately from the perspective of someone interested in the history of Korean society, Ottoboni had very little interaction with Koreans and observed very little of what was going on in the Korea between the wars. This memoir does provide, however, the reader with a lot of anecdotes that show the incredibly poor state of supply for US troops stationed in Korea from 1947-1948 (when Ottoboni was there) and for some of the mistreatment of Koreans by US soldiers.

Interesting treatment of several major travel classics and especially the evolution of certain techniques of narrative and their contribution to the development of the novel. Especially thought the chapters on Mandeville and Marco Polo to be informative, as well as passages on Wonders of the East and Friar William.

Professor 内田 is probably the best scholar in Japan on wartime Shanxi province and it helps that he has great access to archival sources from his many trips there. In his several books he covers all kinds of social issues from wartime Shanxi that may not dazzle in the headlines but on closer examination tackle really important themes from the war.

I enjoyed William Shaw's article on the equalization movement of the 1920s and Henderson's article on early postwar Korea. Unfortunate that the latter was a bit lazy on the footnotes, citing a lot of statistics I would have loved to have been able to trace down.

Written by and mostly for those who appreciate a clear legal approach, this summarizes the case against Knut Hamsun and evaluates the central claims that were key to the guilty verdict reached against him, especially on whether or not Hamsun was indeed a member of NS in wartime.

The book argues that Hamsun's activities were without a doubt treasonous and he could have been prosecuted under any number of criminal treason charges, but the charges and ruling against him in civil proceedings based on his NS membership were flawed, and the medical ruling of his weakened intellect is dubious.

Critics of human rights discourse and new approaches to the history of human rights will probably see this work as an example of the kind of optimistic picture that they are working to deconstruct but from a normative perspective, the term “justice cascade” is useful as a tool and approach. The trick will be to combine this with some of the lessons of the critical scholarship.

Does a good job of selecting some essays that bring out the major themes of Teilhard's mysticism. This is useful for someone who wants to get a grip on his ideas since his works can get extremely repetitive while not always staying consistent in vocabulary and explanation of the central ideas. With some short introductory comments in each section, I felt like this was a good way to get the general overview of the main ideas.

These are a series of three Harvard lectures Fogel gave that have been published. The first of them is an excellent overview of Sino-Japanese relations from the Han dynasty to the late 19th century.

I very much like Fogel's conception of the “Sinosphere” as a replacement for the old “Chinese world order” and the more flexible order it suggests. I suspect the term will take off and get used in other scholarship.

The second essay feels a bit out of place but this often happens in the case of these lectures-turned-book projects. It is more of a report on Fogel's progress on his research into the 1862 voyage of the Senzaimaru, and spends most of its time discussing the Dutch side of his archival research.

The third essay, on the Japanese community in Shanghai from the 1860s until the 1890s will be of great interest to anyone studying Sino-Japanese relations in the second half of the century or interested in the many domains of Japanese activity in Shanghai life in the late-19th century.

For anyone who is doing research on the history of crucial turnover period of the late civil war to early 1950s in China, then this is an important city study that provides a lot of rich local detail and findings based on a variety of great archives. It also is a great example of a turnover which involves CCP cadres from Shandong, mostly rural Luzhongnan, in a mid-sized city.

There is not too much new here, and the arguments advanced are neither terribly original or the writing inspiring. There is an emphasis in the introduction of the book on political ritual and transformation of political culture, but the book seems to stray considerably from this and resemble much more closely a description of Hangzhou's experience of some of the important events that most books on China during the period address: the disciplined nature of troops when taking over the city, the gradual squeeze, the suppression of counterrevolutionaries, the three antis, the five antis, and the new three antis, with a chapter on cultural reforms and women cadres thrown in which both feel a bit detached.

It was, however, all interesting material and looks solid in terms of content and research.

Heard about this author on NPR and became interested in this strange genre of early aftermath of war Germany mystery and thriller literature. I couldn't get the more famous Berlin Noir series by the author at any local bookstores so gave this one a try.

I wanted to quit about half way through. The Gunther character is so painfully implausible.

The necessity to have the dry sarcasm in almost every exchange is what we might expect from a detective in a Law & Order episode or Han Solo, but seemed so bizarre for a character of Gunther's background.

I also got tired of him reminding the reader (via dialog with every character he meets) how the former Waffen-SS detective is not an anti-Semite and disapproved of the many atrocities of National Socialism. It was as if the character felt obligated to stop the action and turn apologetically to the reader periodically.

The book is well written and well researched, but most of the characters felt like they belonged in 1920s Chicago instead of 1945 Germany. The plot of this one wandered and the final setup so suddenly unraveled and implausibly assembled that I feel no compulsion to read any more of Kerr's Gunther works.

Has a short introduction and then the musical notation and lyrics for the wartime songs.

The diary is relatively short but a fascinating look into the experiences of one educated Icelandic priest. His observations of the North African pirates, daily life in North Africa of of peoples and places on his journey back to Denmark and then his home islands often surprise.

Glad this important Icelandic historical document is now available in English translation.

Fantastic work which focuses much on the moral issues related to restorative or transitional justice: especially the question of the moral consequences of aiming primarily at extracting truth - in order to promote social reconciliation in transitional states, or alternatively focusing on retributive justice.

Summarizes the findings of analysis done on a large “transnational justice database” testing various hypotheses often seen in the literature on transitional justice, including comparisons between general efficacy of trials, amnesties, lustrations and truth commissions (maximalist, minimalists, moderates, etc.) and concluding, with reservations in general favor of a combined holistic approach.

It also attempts to evaluate the importance and impact of economic factors (cost of holding trials etc.), transition factors, the backgrounds of leaders in the new regime, etc.

I'm generally skeptical of this kind of raw statistical analysis based on large data sets that categorize and generalize upon highly complex phenomena. There are significant risks of ignoring the judgment calls made in order to simplify these various processes down to data entries in a database. It is common in the social sciences these days and at odds with the approaches favored by many historians, for example. I don't think such work is completely without value, however, and found much of its discussion and its summary of a lot of existing research on the topic of interest.

A survey history of criminal justice from the late imperial period through the cultural revolution. With so much to cover, it is difficult for him to cover any single issue with much depth and it must have been extraordinarily challenging to decide what to focus on.

I was a bit surprised to see so much discussion on prisons and punishment, and relatively little on criminal law and legal proceedings even though these were often subordinated to the political exigencies of the GMD and CCP, I was really hoping to read more on in the work. The introduction suggests that the book will fill in a gap through providing the survey but I found that much of the discussion on prisons, policing, and punishment have been covered in other survey works by Dikötter and Dutton, among others.