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In The Jaws Of The Dragon: America’s Fate In The Coming Era Of Chinese Hegemony
by Eamonn Fingleton
Reviewed by Mary Kissel
May 2008
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.
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The Enchantress Of Florence
by Salman Rushdie
Reviewed by Paul Mozur
May 2008
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.
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Toward An East Asian Exchange Rate Regime and Monetary Policy With Very Low Inflation in the Pacific Rim
by Duck-Koo Chung and Barry J. Eichengreen
Reviewed by Denis McMahon
May 2008
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.
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India After Gandhi: The History Of The World’s Largest Democracy
by Ramachandra Guha
Reviewed by Sripriya Ranganathan
May 2008
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.
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The World Is What It is: The Authorized Biography of V. S Naipaul
by Patrick French
Reviewed by Samanth Subramanian
May 2008
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.
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Democracy And National Identity In Thailand
by Michael Kelly Connors
Reviewed by Bertil Lintner
May 2008
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.
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Failed Diplomacy: The Tragic Story Of How North Korea Got The Bomb
by Charles L. Pritchard
Reviewed by Peter Van Ness
May 2008
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.
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The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures In The World Of Chinese Food
by Jennifer 8. Lee
Reviewed by Tim Kindseth
May 2008
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.
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The BJP's Mr. Modi and the Gujarat Massacre
On Dec. 11 and 16, voters in the western Indian state of Gujarat will go to the polls and most likely re-elect the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Narendra Modi.
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