Coopting Modernity
Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping by Klaus Mühlhahn. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 736 pages, $40. Reviewed by Jason Morgan For decades, many Western China-watchers were convinced that, given time, the People’s...
A Mind-Body Problem in Chinese Philosophy?
Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and the Myth of Holism by Edward Slingerland. Oxford University Press, 2019. Cloth, xi + 385 pages, $35. Reviewed by Jason Morgan When Scottish missionary James Legge (1815–1897) translated, partly under the auspices of...
Dharma and the Constitution
American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War by Duncan Ryūken Williams. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 400 pages, $30. Reviewed by Jason Morgan The Pacific War is generally understood as a political and military...
History’s Untouchables
Who, or What, Dropped the Atom Bombs? Bridging the Atomic Divide: Debating Japan–U.S. Attitudes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Harry Wray and Seishiro Sugihara. Lexington Books, 2019. Hardcover, 340 pages, $115. Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of...
"Haven’s book is an engaging introduction to Girard. Reading through its presentation of the components and explanatory power of mimetic theory, it becomes clear Americans have arrived at a time for a very different kind of choosing."
"Knowing the truth about scapegoating does not mean it has been abandoned. Indeed, while people have become increasingly good at seeing the scapegoats of others as just that, scapegoats, they remain convinced their enemies really are evil."