Come Read With Us This January!
Center for Asia Pacific Studies Winter Book Club
Join a community of readers interested in the Asia Pacific this winter!
- We’ll provide the online link, moderator and the community of fellow readers interested in learning more about the Asia Pacific region–all you need to bring is the book!
- This winter, we’ve selected two popular titles: the first exploring how the movie industry has become “the latest battleground in the tense and complex rivalry” between the United States and China and the second taking you on a journey through time, history, and memory as you explore “the labyrinth that is the Japanese capital.”
- Join us for either or both book club meetings; be sure to reserve your spot today (registration links below).
Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy by Erich Schwartzel
- Tuesday, January 10th, 12 noon – 1 pm, Online via Zoom
- This event is free and open to the USF community and wider public.
- Schwartzel, Erich. Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy. Penguin Random House, 2022.
- This book is available in e-book and print formats. The USF Library has also ordered the e-book.
- Moderator: Melissa Dale, PhD, Executive Director and Associate Professor, Center for Asia Pacific Studies
About the Book:
“From trade to technology to military might, competition between the United States and China dominates the foreign policy landscape. But this battle for global influence is also playing out in a strange and unexpected arena: the movies. The film industry, Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel explains, is the latest battleground in the tense and complex rivalry between these two world powers…The competition between these two movie businesses is a Cold War for this century, a clash that determines whether democratic or authoritarian values will be broadcast most powerfully around the world.”
What reviewers have to say about Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy:
- “This is a fascinating book. It will educate you. Schwartzel has done some extraordinary reporting.” — The New York Times Book Review
- “In this highly entertaining but deeply disturbing book, Erich Schwartzel demonstrates the extent of our cultural thrall to China. His depiction of the craven characters, American and Chinese, who have enabled this situation represents a significant feat of investigative journalism. His narrative is about not merely the movie business, but the new world order.” —Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon
The Bells of Old Tokyo: Meditations on Time and a City by Anna Sherman
- Friday, January 20, 12 noon – 1 pm, Online via Zoom
- This event is free and open to the USF community and wider public.
- Sheman, Anna. The Bells of Old Tokyo: Meditations on Time and a City. Macmillan Publishers, 2019.
- This book is available in e-book and print formats. The USF Library has also ordered the e-book.
- Moderator: James Stone Lunde, PhD, Kiriyama Fellow, Center for Asia Pacific Studies
About the Book:
“From 1632 until 1854, Japan’s rulers restricted contact with foreign countries, a near isolation that fostered a remarkable and unique culture that endures to this day. In hypnotic prose and sensual detail, Anna Sherman describes searching for the great bells by which the inhabitants of Edo, later called Tokyo, kept the hours in the shoguns’ city. An exploration of Tokyo becomes a meditation not just on time, but on history, memory, and impermanence. Through Sherman’s journeys around the city and her friendship with the owner of a small, exquisite cafe, who elevates the making and drinking of coffee to an art-form, The Bells of Old Tokyo follows haunting voices through the labyrinth that is the Japanese capital.”
What reviewers have to say about The Bells of Old Tokyo: Meditations on Time and a City:
- “A completely extraordinary book, unlike anything I have read before. At once modest in tone and vast in scale and ambition, The Bells of Old Tokyo extends in all directions, delicately wrought, precise, unfaltering, lucid and strange as a dream. I haven’t felt so excited about an investigation into place since I first read Rings of Saturn. Like Sebald, Sherman is concerned with war, brutality, nostalgia and loss, but her search for the meaning of time is also radiant and absolutely humane.”–Olivia Laing, author of Crudo and The Lonely City
- “A meditative exploration of time and change…Tokyo’s past, although often physically erased by fires or constant demolition and construction in a nation that prizes change and modernization—is movingly excavated and evoked in this unusual book….Sherman is a profoundly evocative writer.”—Heller McAlpin, The Wall Street Journal
We hope to see you at one or both of our book club meetings. We look forward to discussing these fascinating new books with you!