Book Reviews

Over the last 20 years, there has been quite a boom in the publication of books about the Silk Road. The Silk Road would more accurately be referred to as the plural "Silk Roads," since it was a network of roads rather than a single highway...

Kylee-Anne Hingston, Assistant Professor of English at St. Thomas More College in Saskatoon, Canada, uses a conversational approach and gentle writing to show how literary forms create and determine literary characters' bodily images in her...

In the book's Introduction, Craig Benjamin writes that, between the 2nd century BCE and the mid-3rd century CE, the Silk Roads linked together many cultures and communities throughout Afro-Eurasia. This is the “First Silk Roads Era,” which...

A popular perception both in and out of academia is this: a few millennia ago, agriculture let hunter-gatherers settle down and form permanent societies and governments, which provided better living conditions compared to unsettled nomadic...

Although this is a wonderful read for anyone having a deep infatuation with Japanese history, it mostly appeals to a scholar or a reader who is somewhat familiar with the topic. This, however, should not discourage any passionate readers...

When the first edition of The American West: A New Interpretive History, penned by Professor Robert V. Hine (1921 - 2015) and Professor John Mack Faragher, was published in 2000, it was an instant success despite the field of the American...

Paul Varley, who passed away in 2015, was a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University for many years before coming to the University of Hawai’i. He specialized in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. Varley's book, Warriors of Japan...

The Story of Tutankhamun by egyptologist Garry J. Shaw is a brilliantly written new biography of the boy king, spanning from his birth and early life under his father Akhenaten’s new religious regime, all the way up to his death and the discovery...

Stephen Gaukroger, Emeritus Professor of History of Philosophy and Science at the University of Sydney, presents a fresh viewpoint toward examining the history of Western philosophy. His book The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical Essay...

This is a fairly old book since it was first published in 1996, but it remains the best English-language introduction to the history of the warrior class in ancient Japan. In English, Japanese warriors are usually referred to as ‘samurai’...