"'Take me, too.'
These three words plunge a young white woman named Diane into the world of Baghdad in 1937. A 20-year-old nurse, she falls in love with physician Ibrahim Haddad in London and follows him home to Iraq. Baghdad comes alive in vivid detail as she navigates her interracial marriage to Ibrahim, her in-laws, her high-profile but politically sensitive job as a nanny for the Iraqi royal family, and eventually, her relationship with her own biracial children."

"On Dec. 16, 2022, China extended its threats against Taiwan to include a more direct move against Japan—and its treaty ally, the United States. The Liaoning aircraft carrier sailed quietly east between Okinawa and Miyako islands, of Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture, sandwiching the Japanese territory with China’s mainland to the west..."

A. A. Bastian navigates the commercial and Christian aspirations of Euro-American trading empires in 19th century Asia, through a Water Splotch from the Bay of Bengal in Levi Savage’s ship diary. Hugging India’s glistening Bay of Bengal, Euro-American ships like the Monsoon and Fire Queen carried goods and peoples to and from India and Burma.

“You’ll pronounce Himālaya properly after reading John Keay’s new book. Keay, known for contextualizing broad sweeps of Asian, in particular South Asian, history, tackles the iconic mountain range in Himālaya. His long career writing histories from west to east Asia sets us up comfortably to delve into all the borders of this vast region...

"As U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan today, rumors and false stories flew around the Chinese language online sphere. Claims that PLA Su-35 fighters had crossed into Taiwanese airspace were promptly dismissed by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense. Online assaults, meanwhile, targeted Taiwanese websites...."

"When responding to threats against Taiwan, U.S. leaders generally assume that Chinese leaders actually want to annex the island—as a recent report by the congressionally mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission concluded. ...But over the last few decades, threatening Taiwan has been advantageous for China, often gotten it what it wanted, and has been more fruitful—and far less costly—than seizing the island by force would have been."

"New Hampshire schoolteacher Martha Parker dreamed of taking her place alongside the newest heroines of evangelical Protestant circles. The wives of missionaries in the 1820s suddenly had unparalleled opportunities to promote their progressive values, to travel, and to train others..."

"Read this book for a straightforward discussion of Joseph Smith’s polygamy using several largely ignored primary sources. In it, author Benjamin E. Park also draws out the tensions of minority rights versus majority rule in an early American fledgling democracy. Using the Mormon experiment as a case study, he explores boundaries of race, gender, and whiteness...."

"The word “savage” wouldn’t have been my preferred choice in a title about a land and its people, especially given the exploitive colonial legacy in this particular country. Having said that, the term doesn’t appear again within the pages, and beyond that, it may not have been the author’s decision in the first place. ...Eimer gets off the path to describe what most recent tourists have not seen, the less-choreographed version of Burma. He then mingles his observations with historical snapshots."

Abstract: A new source reveals Burmese bravery at the Shwedagon pagoda following the hostilities of the Second Anglo-Burmese War in 1853. Once buried in the Mormon archives in Salt Lake City a brief journal describing events in and around the Shwedagon Pagoda of that period has surfaced. The journal, written by a man situated in the Shwedagon Pagoda, strengthens postcolonial scholarship focusing on counter narratives to colonial conquest and dominance not easily found in primary sources to date. Destruction or suppression of primary sources served a strategic agenda as another type of bayonet for colonial conquest. Through this new eye witness, we can now glimpse amidst desecration and hostilities into Burmese rebellion against their aggressors.

"Just as curling or fudged, rosy or doomed as our memories swirl through our minds, so Khaled Khalifa wraps us in a story of memories and their power in Aleppo. A mother and her ill-fated children personify the Syrian city as it slowly erodes into chaos and decay under the Assad regime. Memories and reality conflict as the characters encounter delusions of themselves and the world they’ve known."

"Detective Laafrit is trying to quit. Will sucking lozenges keep him from smoking while he searches for the murderer of four Moroccans washed ashore near Tangier’s coastline? The case takes on international proportions as ties between the murdered men and intrigues in Spain emerge. Whitefly opens with youth protesting illegally for jobs, a parallel to Laafrit’s activist youth. He must defuse the situation to save the students from the retribution of the Moroccan police force, famed for torturing their captured."

"Feel through the darkness with Aziz, who is being held in detention; bits of cloth, a nail, a spattering of blood, a bone. He lies imprisoned in a kitchen awaiting his own death amidst the rot of others who have passed before him. A Rare Blue Bird Flies With Me centers on Aziz’s first-person confrontation with imprisonment, while other characters, also in first person, take turns relaying their encounters with Aziz. This multiple-narrative approach is an Arab literary technique that takes you intimately into the mind of each character."

"A literary friend bans the mere mention of career and the two-fingered clasp of that must-carry calling card. A self-proclaimed “New Yorker in exile,” she hosted a dinner party for artists in Washington, DC. She abhors the city’s drabness and its dark-suit-wearing crowd of lawyers who represent a place in which she’s endured far too many so-what-do-you-do’s?

She’s not the only disgruntled literary New Yorker I’ve met in DC, but I can’t relate."

"Ibrahim Essa’s new novel, The Televangelist, is a powerful commentary on Islam in modern Egypt with deep insight for Westerners. Nothing is what it seems. The last few pages of the book will surprise you so much you’ll want to read them again to see how it all plays out.

Sheik Hatem is a televangelist for a popular call-in show based in Cairo. When he is tasked with turning a high-profile leader’s son back from his conversion to Christianity, he finds himself in the middle of a high-stakes mission that risks his position with the state in its tight control over religious media."

"Feel the depth charges pummeling the bodies of Hugh Barr Miller Jr. and his fellows as they reach for a floater net, a life raft, or a scrap of wreckage buoyant enough to separate them from the sea floor. Historian Stephen Harding continues his stream of gripping naval battle accounts with The Castaway's War, set in and around the Solomon Islands of the Pacific. It’s a World War II survival tale taken from official sources and personal diaries."

"My boyfriend is 47 and lives in the 1850s. Nerdy writers understand those late nights, at least I’m hoping. Explaining my book to people living in the twenty first century, though, takes a bit of finesse. Researching a Mormon man, deceased as he is, shouldn’t stir any controversy. Not until he’s published, at least…."

"A day after Elam Luddington baptized his first and only convert in Siam, Captain James Trail, the King of Siam thrust the convert into a debtor’s prison without food. The captain’s crime was misunderstanding a command and firing a salute from his ship in the rhodes of Singapore. With only one baptism, is it possible that Luddington's apparent failure washed him from our collective Mormon memories?"

"If we down play the role of Facebook in the overthrow of the Egyptian president, we ignore the voices of young conservative women whose main contribution is through Facebook. Before the recent uprisings, Egypt had more than 2 million male Facebook users and almost 2 million female users from a population of 77 million, totaling roughly 3 percent of the population. The 1.5 percent of Egyptian female users reached unprecedented audiences. Worood, for example, is a prolific Facebook user."