Asian Americans: An Encyclopedia of Social, Cultural, Economic, and Political History is a three-volume reference work that provides approximately 600 comprehensive articles that cover a wide range of topics pertaining to Asian American studies. This was a daunting project for the editors Xiaojian Zhao and Edward J.W. Park to manage since the subject of Asian Americans is so broad and diverse, and they “recognize that the completion of such an undertaking is only one step to our ever-expanding knowledge of the Asian American experience” (xix).

The alphabetically arranged entries are written and signed by more than 200 scholars and the institutional affiliations of these contributors are listed in volume 3. Each volume contains the “List of Entries,” “Preface,” and six-page introduction, “Asian Americans in the Twenty-First Century,” that is rich with statistics about population, socioeconomic status, and education. Volume 1 includes a forty-eight-page comprehensive chronology that begins with the arrival of Asian groups to North America in 13,000 BC to 10,000 BC and ends with Yitang Zhang’s breakthrough prime number theorem in 2013. Volume 3 comprises a “Selected Bibliography” along with over fifty excerpts from many different legal acts, landmark cases, and other primary documents.

There are eighteen different Asian ethnicities represented and each group is unique with their specialized cultures and histories. Readers will find the most in-depth and lengthier entries about the Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese Americans. Even though the essays about the Bangladeshi, Cambodian, Lao, Pakistani, Taiwanese, Thai, and Tibetan Americans are not as extensive, they are still very illuminating. The Bhutanese Americans entry is the smallest with only one paragraph, and the Malaysian and Sri Lankan American articles are less than one page in length.

Some of the essays also address the shared experiences and common themes among the groups. These include the “Asian American Movement (AAM),” “Asian Music in America,” “Asian Religions and Religious Practices in America,” and “Political Participation.” All the articles conclude with cross-references and a bibliography of print and online sources for further reading.

A major portion of this encyclopedia contains biographical entries about famous people like Connie Chung, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bruce Lee, Maya Lin, Yo-Yo Ma, and Tiger Woods. However, many of the biographies are about lesser known Asian American artists, athletes, historians, politicians, scientists, and writers. This encyclopedia would be much more functional if it had biographical, geographical, and topical indexes or finders because unless you know the name of the individual there is no way of discovering these prominent figures.

A great supplement to this source is Huping Ling and Allan Austin’s two-volume work Asian American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia (Sharpe Reference, 2010). It incorporates information about many of the same Asian American groups and is organized alphabetically by group ethnicity. There is a fair amount of overlap between the two sources, yet Ling and Austin’s encyclopedia could be useful in filling in some of the gaps with the Hmong, Malaysian, Singaporean, and Sri Lankan Americans. Both encyclopedias also chose to include information about the native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islander people although Zhao and Park state, “To lump Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders together with Asian Americans is to marginalize these groups of people” (xix).

Overall, the editors of Asian Americans: An Encyclopedia of Social, Cultural, Economic, and Political History did an outstanding job compiling this reliable and significant work, and it is highly recommended for both academic and public libraries.