New Books Network

Steven Herman spent 1990-2006 in Japan, most of those years with Voice of America. He served as South East Asia Bureau Chief as well as North East Asia Bureau Chief for the Korean Peninsula & Japan. Over his 16 years living in Japan he covered the Kobe Earthquake as well as the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster, which he said was "covering three disasters at the same time.”

He also recounts his more recent days as a White House Foreign Correspondent, especially his time as a traveling pool reporter. You'll learn what it's like to fly on Air Force One, why he got banned (twice) from X by Elon Musk, that "Presidential M&M's" are a thing, and his best advice for those wanting to write a book about their experiences in a foreign country.

Finally, he gives a concise account of what happened to VOA in the Trump Administration, his role as a whistle-blower, and tells us why DOGE shut them down. Herman retired from VOA in mid 2025 and now teaches journalism. In this latter discussion, he reveals how he blew the biggest scoop ever in his journalism career.

Herman is currently the executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy & Innovation in the School of Journalism & New Media at the University of Mississippi.

Some of Herman's favorite books on Japan are:

Notes in Japan, by Alfred Parsons (1896)

No Surrender: My 30-year War the autobiography of Noda Hiro (1974, transl. Charles S. Terry)

The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa (Princeton Univ. Press, 1991)

You can find Steve Herman on social media at:

Mastadon, Blue Sky, Threads, Substack, LinkedIn and Instagram

The Books on Asia Podcast is co-produced with Plum Rain Press.

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Something deep within you recognizes it–the instinct that sacrifice matters, that something must be offered, that violence and beauty are woven together in ways that mere reason cannot explain. You are not alone. Civilizations throughout history have felt it.

In Bloodshed and Blessing: Stories of Sacrifice from Ancient Altars to the Holy Mass (Sophia Institute Press, 2026), Fr. Dwight Longenecker takes you on a gripping journey through ten ancient cultures, from the Aztecs to the Vikings, in which blood sacrifice was not the mark of barbarism but the beating heart of an entire worldview. And then he asks the question that will stop you cold: What if they weren’t so different from us?

Well, they weren’t. And once you see this reality, you can’t unsee it. Fr. Longenecker shows you that the violence, resentment, and desperate longing for meaning surging through our culture today are the very same forces that once drove men to the altar of sacrifice. The difference is that we have largely forgotten the One True Sacrifice that puts them all into perspective.

The ancient peoples were our ancestors – not just biologically but spiritually. Their worldview, so seemingly foreign to us, echoes down through the ages into our own deepest longings and anxieties.

In a culture surging with resentment and a desperate hunger for meaning, Fr. Longenecker shows you how sacrifice has always been humanity’s answer–a way of channeling violence into something transcendent, of transforming chaos into communion.

The questions people were asking then are the same ones we are asking now. And the answer, it turns out, has been on the altar all along.

Fr. Dwight Longenecker was brought up an Evangelical, studied at fundamentalist Bob Jones University, and later was ordained as an Anglican priest in England. After ten years in the Anglican ministry as a curate, a chaplain at Cambridge, and a country parson, in 1995 Dwight was received into full communion with the Catholic Church. He has published in numerous religious magazines and papers in the UK, Ireland, and the USA, writing on film and theology, apologetics, Biblical commentary and Catholic culture.

Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, available here on the New Books Network and wherever podcasts are found.
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Taiwanese cinema is internationally celebrated for the
auteurs of the Taiwan New Cinema. Yet over the past fifteen years,
ghosts, demons, curses and haunted screens have become increasingly
prominent, turning horror from a marginal genre into an important strand
of Taiwan’s popular cinema.

Professor Corrado Neri’s new book, Taiwanese Horror Cinema in the 21st Century: Spectral Narratives and Screen Culture (Anthem
Press, 2026), explores this transformation. Neri argues that Taiwanese
horror has reached a new stage of maturity: it is now an established
industrial category, has diversified across genres and media, and has
developed a sophisticated capacity to address Taiwan’s social,
historical and technological anxieties.

The book also launches the new short book series, ‘Anthem Impact in Asian Media, Cinema and Communications’.

In this podcast conversation, Dr Ming-yeh Rawnsley talks
with Professor Neri about what Taiwanese horror can tell us about Taiwan
itself. Their discussion moves from ghosts and folklore to democracy,
historical memory, digital culture and changing understandings of
identity. Themes include:

Why horror? – how a once-marginal genre became an important part of Taiwanese cinema.

Taiwan as a ‘Ghost Nation’ – why ghosts offer powerful ways of thinking about Taiwan’s contested history and identity.

Horror,
democracy and historical memory – how liberalisation opened new
possibilities for confronting difficult histories, notably the White
Terror in Detention.

Religion,
folklore and the supernatural – how beliefs, rituals and local legends
provide filmmakers with distinctive cultural resources.

Digital ghosts – how smartphones, social media, gaming and screen culture have transformed haunting.

Gender, sexuality and queer horror – how films such as Marry My Dead Body use supernatural conventions to explore changing social identities.

Taiwan
within Asian horror cinema – how Taiwanese filmmakers engage with
regional traditions while developing recognisably local forms.

One of the book’s most compelling arguments is that the
supernatural provides a productive language for exploring Taiwan’s
relationship with its past and present. Detention transforms the political violence of the White Terror into a spectral landscape of memory, guilt and historical reckoning. The Tag-Along, The Rope Curse and Incantation bring folklore and ritual into contact with cameras, smartphones and social media.

Taiwanese horror is also transmedial. Detention moved from video game to feature film, television series and novel; The Bridge Curse and Incantation have extended into gaming, while The Tag-Along
has expanded into webtoon and virtual reality. Horror thus forms part
of a wider creative ecosystem in which cinema intersects with digital
media, popular culture and Taiwan’s cultural-content industries.

Taiwanese horror therefore deserves attention beyond horror
enthusiasts or film specialists. These films frighten, surprise and
sometimes make audiences laugh, but their ghosts also carry history.
They negotiate memories of authoritarianism and democratisation,
questions of gender and sexuality, and move between temples, cinemas,
video games and smartphone screens.

The ghosts haunting contemporary Taiwanese cinema are
rarely just ghosts. They offer another way of asking questions about
Taiwan: how the past survives in the present, how identities are
continually remade, and how a rapidly changing society chooses to
remember—and imagine—itself.

Dr Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley is a Research Associate at the
Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS University of London, and a host for the
New Books Network. She is also a co-editor (with Professor Gary
Rawnsley) of the short book series, ‘Anthem Impact in Asian Media,
Cinema and Communications’.
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Brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group.

Decolonizing Environmentalism: Alternative Visions and Practices of Environmental Action (Bloomsbury, 2024) helps
us reimagine our approach to environmental stewardship critically
interrogating the problems associated with existing legacies of
environmentalism and how we imagine other ways to addressing the multiple planetary crises.

The
authors cast a critical eye on wealthy and influential environmental
groups that committed to anti-racist strategies in the wake of the
racial awakening of 2020. Yet, they continue to embrace false solutions
like carbon markets and biodiversity offsets, which carry deeply
racialized consequences. By tracing the roots of these misplaced
priorities to detrimental modernity steeped in colonialism and
capitalism, the authors call for transformational changes in
human-nature relationships. They distill lessons from the divestment
movement, which has questioned the fossil fuel industry's moral
standing, and food sovereignty activists, who have mobilized global
civil society to hold agribusiness corporations accountable.

In
these extraordinary times, Decolonizing Environmentalism invites
readers to embark on a transformative journey to embrace anti-racist,
emancipatory, and regenerative approaches to environmentalism.

Prakash Kashwan is
an educator, author, and scholar, whose work cuts across the fields of
climate governance, environmental and climate justice, and international
affairs. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Environmental
Studies at Brandeis University. He also holds faculty affiliations with
the Heller School of Social Policy & Management, and Politics
Department at Brandeis. Before moving to Brandeis, he was a tenured
Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
Connecticut and Co-directed the Economic and Social Rights Research
Program at UConn's Human Rights Institute.

Pauline Heinrichs is a Lecturer in War Studies (Climate and Energy) at King’s College London. Her
research focuses on global environmental politics with a particular
focus on climate and energy security, climate justice grievances,
international orders and questions concerning security and existential
risks in a warming world. She co-directs the Centre for Integrated
Research in Risk and Resilience (CIRRR) and the Environmental Security
Research Group.
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Why do people read? In The Love of Books: Attachment to a Changing Cultural Object (Manchester University Press, 2026) María Angélica Thumala Olave, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science, explores people’s relationship to books and to reading, demonstrating the pleasure and importance books provide in contemporary life. Moving beyond a narrow focus on the social status offered by books and reading, the analysis shows the role of material objects, along with the emotional engagements and social bonds forged by the practices associated with books and reading.
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