A New Novel by Gary Pak

Nam Kun and Nam Ki Han, brothers born on a Wahiawa sugar plantation, could not have been more different. Pragmatic and stubborn, Nam Kun dutifully supported his family but refused to become “one Christian fanatic” like his widowed mother and youngest sibling, Nam Ki. When Nam Ki is drafted into the army at the start of the Korean War, he tells Nam Kun that as a Christian he cannot kill. “You gotta do it,” Nam Kun replies, thinking the war will make a man of this “mama’s boy. ”

Nam Ki finds refuge from the chaos and brutality of life as a soldier in his love for a young Korean woman, a Christian. He returns after the war to search for her and discovers she has become a prostitute. With his sense of reality shattered, Nam Ki must choose between his faith and all that he has witnessed in war-torn Korea. Brothers under a Same Sky explores the social and psychological turmoil experienced by Korean Americans during and after the war but, more importantly, it examines the individual’s decision to keep—or betray—a fundamental belief in human goodness.

A Latitude 20 Book
July 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3605-4 / $19.00 (PAPER)

Constructive Living for Mental Health

Adapting ideas from Japanese psychotherapies and Eastern thought, Constructive Living (CL) offers a sensible way of living. Across cultures and generations, CL ideas make sound, practical sense. Water, Snow, Water: Constructive Living for Mental Health presents the current state of CL in its application to the West. Using a variety of materials—including essays, tales, maxims, detailed behavioral advice, case studies—David Reynolds, the founder of CL, presents fresh perspectives on everything from worrying to love, from psychotherapy to death.

“You can’t be happy all the time. You can’t feel comfortable all the time. You can’t have the feelings you want when you want them for as long as you want them. Life just doesn’t operate like that. Maybe you have tried counseling or therapy or diets or meditation or chemicals or some sort of esoteric magic to work on your feelings, to fix your life or make it perfect. Nothing worked as well as you had hoped. Reading this book won’t solve your life problems either. But it will give you some suggestions that are sensible, practical and doable—suggestions about how to work on your life. Work is the key word here. Sitting and talking with someone is not enough. Venting your feelings is not enough. Putting your mind in some quiet inner place is not enough. Working on your life involves moving your body, doing your life purposefully and constructively. This book offers you concrete assignments for such activity.” —from the Introduction

July 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3695-5 / $12.99 (PAPER)

The Ancient Sites of Southeast Asia and Their Conservation

The ancient ruins of Southeast Asia have long sparked curiosity and romance in the world’s imagination. They appear in accounts of nineteenth-century French explorers, as props for Indiana Jones’ adventures, and more recently as the scene of Lady Lara Croft’s fantastical battle with the forces of evil. They have been featured in National Geographic magazine and serve as backdrops for popular television travel and reality shows. Now A Heritage of Ruins: The Ancient Sites of Southeast Asia and Their Conservation, William Chapman’s expansive new study explores the varied roles these monumental remains have played in the histories of Southeast Asia’s modern nations.

“William Chapman has produced a remarkably cogent and well-balanced portrayal of an emblematic Southeast Asian building type—the monumental ruin. He impressively presents the full array of influences—natural context, social history, and heritage protection legislation—that shape the existence of these architectural remains, and comments eloquently and insightfully on how they influence those who experience them today.” —John H. Stubbs, author of Time Honored: A Global View of Architectural Conservation, and director of the Preservation Studies program, Tulane University

July 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3631-3 / $59.00 (CLOTH)

The Environmental Context of a Global Power

Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power, edited by Ian Jared Miller, Julia Adeney Thomas, and Brett L. Walker, is a timely collection of essays that explores the relationship between Japan’s history, culture, and physical environment. It greatly expands the focus of previous work on Japanese modernization by examining Japan’s role in global environmental transformation and how Japanese ideas have shaped bodies and landscapes over the centuries.

“At last, a multi-faceted environmental history of Japan! Ranging from a Tokugawa national biological survey to the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, this fascinating volume is now the place to start for anyone interested in the subject.” —J. R. McNeill, Georgetown University

July 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3876-8 / $30.00 (PAPER)

Melanesia: Art and Encounter

Melanesia is one of the most culturally diverse and artistically fertile regions of the world. This book is an exploration of one of the richest collections of Melanesian art, that of the British Museum. It is the product of sustained dialogue with people from Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, West Papua, and New Caledonia, who are authors or co-authors of many of its chapters. Melanesia: Art and Encounter, edited by Lissant Bolton, Nicholas Thomas, Elizabeth Bonshek, Julie Adams, and Ben Burt, is a companion to this outstanding collection.

“Melanesia: Art and Encounter charts the terms of engagement between Melanesians and their material traces in a major Western museum. The contributors harness the power of a remarkable collection of artefacts to unsettle and recreate cultural memory and to highlight cross-cultural connections between persons and things. Beautifully illustrated and carefully researched, this volume brilliantly demonstrates the Melanesian axiom that objects and images realise, animate, and sometimes disrupt relationships.” —Robert Foster, University of Rochester

July 2013
ISBN 978-0-8248-3853-9 / $120.00 (CLOTH)

Two New Titles in the Spatial Habitus Series

Although modernization in Korea started more than a century later than in the West, it has worked as a prominent ideology throughout the past century—in particular it has brought radical changes in Korean architecture and cities. Traditional structures and ways of life have been thoroughly uprooted in modernity’s continuous negation of the past. Architecture and Urbanism in Modern Korea, by Inha Jung, presents a comprehensive overview of architectural development and urbanization in Korea within the broad framework of modernization.

“Inha Jung has written a fine volume, full of very well informed accounts of events, insightful analyses of projects, and nuanced ideas about the unique flow of architectural and urban modernization in Korea. Jung is a mature scholar who delivers a well-balanced and original account that is both ambitious in scope and delivered in unencumbered and economical prose, with lavish documentation should one want to go further into particular aspects. It is a book that can easily be read and appreciated by people outside the field, in, say, cultural or Korean studies, as well as by those without disciplinary affiliation who are simply interested in Korea.” —Peter G. Rowe, Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Harvard University

July 2013
ISBN 978-0-8248-3585-9 / $42.00 (CLOTH)

When the Chinese Nationalist Party nominally reunified the country in 1928, Chiang Kai-shek and other party leaders insisted that Nanjing was better suited than Beijing to serve as its capital. For the next decade, until the Japanese invasion in 1937, Nanjing was the “model capital” of Nationalist China, the center of not just a new regime, but also a new modern outlook in a China destined to reclaim its place at the forefront of nations. Interesting parallels between China’s recent rise under the Post-Mao Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist era have brought increasing scholarly attention to the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937); however, study of Nanjing itself has been neglected. In China’s Contested Capital: Architecture, Ritual, and Response in Nanjing, Charles Musgrove brings the city back into the discussion of China’s modern development, focusing on how it was transformed from a factional capital with only regional influence into a symbol of nationhood—a city where newly forming ideals of citizenship were celebrated and contested on its streets and at its monuments.

“China’s Contested Capital provides a nuanced, holistic view of the political, spatial, and social dimensions of Nanjing as the Guomindang capital. The grandiose plans for the governmental complex and the strikingly novel architecture of individual buildings aimed to promote Nanjing, Sun Yat-sen’s ‘Three Principles of the People,’ and the ROC’s governmental structure as modernist templates to the rest of the world. Musgrove’s chronicle of the optimism that propelled the city’s transformation and its eventual disappointment allows us to apprehend as never before the lively drama of Nanjing urban space.” —Peter J. Carroll, Wayne V. Jones Research Professor in History, Northwestern University

July 2013
ISBN 978-0-8248-3628-3 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia’s Architecture
Published in association with Hong Kong University Press