non-fiction
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Brief Review: Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Classic McCarthy: people on the road, lawless expanses, sparse dialogue, meaningless cruelty. This is McCarthy before he became famous, this novel dating from 1968. I can understand why you would be drawn to the worlds of darkness he creates. But if you are, like me, drawn to his minor…
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In the New Era of “Beautiful Harmony,” Japan Needs Change
On a pleasant Sunday morning in late April, I stopped for a quick bite of onigiri rice cakes at a small urban park in Yokohama, Japan’s second most populous city. That Sunday was only the second day of renkyū, Japan’s season of “consecutive holidays,” which this spring extended to a full ten days due to…
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My brief encounter with Peter Preston
The Guardian website has today published the obituary of Peter Preston, one of the newspaper’s most influential past editors who shaped it largely as we know it today. I learned a lot from the obituary about the man and the paper. It also brought back the memory of a brief encounter I had with Preston more…
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2017: My Year in Books
Looking back on the past year, I can say it was full of good reads. Besides countless scholarly titles and articles we academics have to read (or skim through, if I’m honest) throughout the year, I enjoyed two dozen or so carefully selected books. For the most part, they didn’t disappoint. For this post, I…
Sherzod Muminov 