There is nothing scarier for the uninformed than the rise of China. Beijing’s bustling economy is fast outpacing its neighbors’ and threatening America’s economic dominance. Its authoritarian leaders are only pretending to embrace capitalism, forcing consumers to save their yuan, shackling workers into slave-like labor and suppressing the local currency. Evil American multinationals are playing right along, of course, lobbying hard for Beijing in Washington. And those vaunted foreign correspondents? They’ve all been duped.

Salman Rushdie’s new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, ranges between the Mughal court of Akbar, Medici-era Florence and the battlefields of Central Asia, all the while masterfully mixing European renaissance and Persian poetic traditions. For most writers, such range is undreamed of, and at times, this ambitious straddling of cultures has proven too much even for Mr. Rushdie. Although he has perhaps done the best job blending the literary and historical traditions of the East and the West in the past half century, some of Mr. Rushdie’s more recent works have seemed a touch overextended.

In a case of a lesson too well learned, the foreign reserves amassed by East Asian nations to defend their currencies against another 1997-style financial crisis, are being signaled out as the next great threat to global financial stability. The symbiotic relationship whereby Asian governments used those reserves to buy huge amounts of dollar debt—keeping United States interest rates low and subsidizing U.S. consumers’ purchases of Asian exports—was always unsustainable in the long term. But the unraveling of the U.S. financial system, the looming threat of recession and the declining value of the dollar signal the coming end of the virtuous circle. What East Asia does about it is drawing more attention to the region’s monetary policy than at any time in the last 10 years.

Many readers may find the language used in this book somewhat obscure and confusing, perhaps even bombastic with concepts such as “organismic metaphors” and “democrasubjection.” It may be a heavy read, but it is nevertheless worth reading in order to understand Thailand’s often bewildering political developments. Michael Connors, a lecturer at La Trobe University in Melbourne, analyzes Thailand’s rocky road toward democracy over the past century, and how it has related to the formation of a Thai national identity. This long road began with King Chulalongkorn, who reigned from 1868 to 1910 and built the administrative structure of the nation-state in response to the threat of colonialism.

The survival and resilience of India is something that has been taken for granted by most Indians born in or after the 1970s and questioned anxiously by those born earlier. What is it that has contributed to the country’s survival despite all its seemingly fissiparous traits—multiple languages, religions, ethnic groups and ways of life. The question remains as relevant today as it was when India was a fledgling republic. This is the central theme in Ramachandra Guha’s detailed and thought-provoking history of post independence India. Mr. Guha is not a conventional historian—he has acquired degrees in economics and sociology and pursued a teaching career before becoming a full-fledged writer and journalist. Yet, his history of India is not amateurish.

The six-party talks aimed at the denuclearization of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are in stalemate, and progress is unlikely as long as George W. Bush remains president of the United States. A main reason is that Kim Jong-il is hoping the next president will be a Democrat. Pyongyang assumes that such a result would allow it to get a better deal—and almost certainly a more consistent negotiating partner—than is currently the case under the Bush administration.

Patrick French’s biography of V. S. Naipaul takes its fatalistic title from the opening of A Bend in the River: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” In that book, the narrator Salim watches his country twist and bend through a series of rapid changes, with all the helplessness of the classic postcolonial victim. Victimhood and helplessness seem implicit, in fact, in that very first phrase, and in Mr. French’s biography, they also seem implicit in Mr. Naipaul’s conception of himself.

New York Times metro reporter-cum-socialite Jennifer 8. Lee writes near the beginning of her self-serving chop suey of a book, “I am obsessed with Chinese restaurants.” She eats her way through 42 states in the United States (“I had driven until bugs had splattered across my windshield like egg whites dropped in soup.”) and over a dozen other countries across six continents, from Peru to Mauritius.

Mark Leonard thinks big. His previous book, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, he says, “set out a vision—which I still believe in—of how Europe’s model could become the most influential system in the world.” Then he went to China, and now contends “it is China, with its vast size, its economic dynamism, and the political skill of its leaders that is the most serious contender for global leadership in the long term.”

The “nation” is an idiom, a reality in time, space, and practice that needs to be constructed and sustained. For the many who are currently engaged in the practical necessity of nation-building, the task of breathing life into this idiom is a Sisyphean task. But what of challenging the established notion of nation and transforming it into something new? Namhee Lee’s Minjung offers a deeply researched and reflective account of the multifaceted and painstaking efforts made by South Korean intellectuals and students during the authoritarian period of the 1970s and 1980s to build a “counterpublic sphere.” According to Ms. Lee, a professor of Asian languages and cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, the rise of the minjung (or common people) movement was critical to rehabilitating modern Korean history from one of “failure” to one of redemption and authenticity.