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Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda

by Gretchen Peters

Reviewed by Ian Chesley

June 2009

One of the most incisive lines in Gretchen Peters’ new book about the Afghan opium trade is buried on page 134: “The Taliban and their allies may be earning hundreds of millions from the drug trade, but one thing almost everyone interviewed for this project agreed on was that crooked members of Hamid Karzai’s administration are earning even more.” Opium may be bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda, as the book’s subtitle announces, but the huge participation of Afghan government officials in the production and trafficking of opium is a profoundly inconvenient fact for the United States/NATO mission in the country.
Posted June 12, 2009

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Knowledge, Organizational Evolution and Market Creation

by Gita Sud De Surie

Reviewed by Dinesh Sharma

April 2009

A collection of books has recently been published celebrating India’s economy on the global stage. None of the books, however, attempt to describe the behavioral, organizational and developmental process involved in transforming the world’s second largest population into the workforce for the information and biotech age.

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China High: My Fast Times in the 010: A Beijing Memoir

by ZZ

Reviewed by Nick Frisch

April 2009

After a plethora of over hyped titles—such as Beijing Doll, Shanghai Baby, and Candy—which promised to give the inside scoop on modern China’s drugged out, oversexed, freewheeling underside, readers would justly be skeptical toward a book called China High.

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2008's Best China Books

Reviewed by Jeffrey Wasserstrom

January 2009

In this look back at some of the best accessible China books of 2008, just think of me as your personal Amazon.com, a bundler of titles that go well together. For my approach here will not be the usual one of focusing on single works, but rather that of creating thematic pairs of books that are particularly effective when read together.
Posted January 28, 2009

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City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong

by Leo Ou-fan Lee

Reviewed by Paul Mozur

January 2009

It has always been a Herculean task for a writer to adequately capture the spirit of a city. Frustratingly, the feat, when accomplished, can only be a fleeting victory. Cities change as quickly as the writer can pen a book to describe them. A formerly colonial city that straddles China and the West, a hub of global commerce and trade, Hong Kong has proven especially hard to pin down.
Posted January 15, 2009

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Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

by Xiaolu Guo

Reviewed by Ivy Wang

December 2008

Midway through Xiaolu Guo's novel Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, the young protagonist Fenfang listens to her American friend explain his version of Einstein's theory of relativity over a steaming cauldron of hotpot.
Posted December 9, 2008

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Cold Steel

by Tim Bouquet and Byron Ousey

Reviewed by Alina Bakunina

November 2008

A few months ago the Financial Times published an article about the world’s largest steelmaker, ArcelorMittal, preparing for yet another acquisition. Although the deal between ArcelorMittal and the United States-based Alpha Natural Resources is stalling, Lakshmi Mittal’s unswerving determination to consolidate the global steel industry and his uncanny ability to orchestrate challenging takeover deals hints that he will come out on top with a winning strategy.
Posted November 10, 2008

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The Open Road: the Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

by Pico Iyer

Reviewed by Oakley Brooks

October 2008

Anybody who watched the Lhasa riots in mid-March and the spill-over pro-Tibet protests in China and the rest of the world has seen an interesting subplot develop between the protesters and the Dalai Lama. As their spiritual and political leader, he appeared to have very little control, despite Beijing’s assurances that he was behind the uprising. Lhasa Tibetans’ beating and killing of ethnic Chinese and burning and looting of their businesses flew in the face of his steadfast calls for nonviolence. And the stated political goals of many protesters—returning him to an independent Tibet—contrasted strongly with his willingness to accept limited autonomy from China. At one point in the maelstrom, he even threatened to resign.
Posted October 10, 2008

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Stuffed and Starved

by Raj Patel

Reviewed by Piali Roy

October 2008

When Kamal Nath walked away from the World Trade Organization’s “emergency” Geneva talks, India’s Commerce and Industry minister lay bare his frustration with European and American intransigence to their trade-distorting agricultural subsidies. Add the riots in Haiti and the rice shortages in the Philippines just months earlier and the rise of food instability is an unwelcome surprise. Raj Patel’s timely Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System takes aim at the inequalities of the global food system, one that allows the stuffed to outnumber the starved: one billion people are overweight as 800 million people go hungry.
Posted October 8, 2008

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My Friend the Fanatic: Travels With an Indonesian Islamist

by Sadanand Dhume

Reviewed by Robert W. Hefner

September 2008

In April 2003, Sadanand Dhume quit his job with the FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW and The Wall Street Journal Asia to turn full-time to writing a book about the growing influence of militant Islam in Indonesia. Over the next 16 months, and again in February 2007, Mr. Dhume traveled across Indonesia to meet with celebrity preachers, Islamist teachers, jihadi fighters and a host of other denizens of the conservative wing of Indonesia’s vast Muslim community.
Posted September 5, 2008

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China's Great Train

by Abrahm Lustgarten

Reviewed by Ron Gluckman

September 2008

On July 1, 2006, the first train rolled out of Beijing, bound for the “Rooftop of the World.” Chinese media coverage was justifiably hysterical. As the train roared towards Tibet, it embodied, for the Chinese, the ultimate achievement against all odds. Beijing hyped the world’s highest altitude railway, a $4.2 billion line that not only defied skeptical experts, but dazzled engineers and train buffs around the globe. The controversial train also delivered on a half-century Chinese dream, connecting its last, most isolated outpost to Beijing. Critics said it signaled the demise of Tibet.
Posted September 5, 2008

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Four Crises and a Peace Process

by P. R. Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, and Stephen P. Cohen

Reviewed by Samanth Subramanian

July 2008

If political scientists had to design for themselves a petri dish to examine the behavior of states in conflict, they couldn't do much better than placing India and Pakistan under the microscope. On one side of the Line of Control is a constitutionally secular republic, with the glorious messes of democracy, a nuclear arsenal and a hurrying economy. On the other side is an Islamic state, also nuclear, intermittently democratic at best, and dominated by its military. Around them, in apprehension, sits the international community, pulling what strings it has. As a laboratory, it's riveting.
Posted July 12, 2008

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Beijing Time

by Michael Dutton

Reviewed by Nicholas Frisch

May 2008

As a non-expert in urban theory, I can hardly presume to marshal a surefooted command of postmodern and postcolonial analysis in critiquing Michael Dutton’s elaborate theoretical edifice. One thing, however, is certain: Beijing Time is a terrible read. Since misery loves company, perhaps I should inflict a bit of the prose upon our readers.

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The White Tiger

by Aravind Adiga

Reviewed by Ben Frumin

May 2008

Aravind Adiga’s debut novel, The White Tiger, portrays India as a place that “has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality.” It is not a place where village life, often exalted in Indian literature, is built upon family unity, but a place where parents don’t bother to name their children. Mr. Adiga’s is an India where votes are bought and elections are fixed, where never-ending bribes are packed in expensive Italian handbags, and where working “with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication and insincerity” leads to enrichment and success.
Posted May 15, 2008

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King Hui:
The Man Who Owned
All the Opium in Hong Kong

by Jonathan Chamberlain

Reviewed by Paul Mozur

April 2008

The short story In a Grove by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (the basis of Akira Kurosawa’s movie Rashomon) tells the tale of a murder through three conflicting accounts of the crime, one told by the deceased victim, one by the victim’s wife and the third by the accused criminal. Each account is very different and the reader can easily see the ways each narrator attempts to cast him or herself in a certain light. But each is also consistent with corroborating stories and the physical evidence at the scene of the crime. At the end of the story, one is left with the hopeless task of cobbling together some semblance of truth from the three narratives.

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A Floating City of Peasants

by Floris-Jan van Luyn

Reviewed by Malia Politzer

May 2008

In 2005, there were 191 million international migrants, or people living outside their native countries, according to data from the United Nations. Compare this to as many as 210 million Chinese migrant workers moving from their rural homes to cities, and it's easy to see why some immigration experts call it the largest mass migration in human history.
Posted May 13, 2008

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Eating India: Exploring a Nation's Cuisine

by Chitrita Banerji

Reviewed by Samanth Subramanian

April 2008

While the old cliché that one can never judge a book by its cover holds true, it is occasionally possible to make some accurate judgements based on how far apart the book’s covers are. In the case of Chitrita Banerji’s Eating India: Exploring a Nation’s Cuisine, the covers are separated by 329 pages – which either indicates that the sheer ambition of this project will have proved foolhardy, or that the book is printed in microscopic print.

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Rising Star

by Bates Gill

Reviewed by Arthur Waldron

November 2007

The argument of this well-researched and useful volume is that since the middle of the last decade, Beijings foreign and security policy have shifted away from previous unilateralism toward cooperation, consultation and the playing of a responsible and constructive role with respect to areas ranging from regional security to nuclear proliferation.
Posted November 19, 2007

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Billions of Entrepreneurs

by Tarun Khanna

Reviewed by Salil Tripathi

Mr. Khanna adopts a sober tone in this work, maintaining steadfast neutrality in analyzing the astonishing growth of the two countries, which will surely do much to reshape the way the world looks in the coming years. Besides neutrality, Mr. Khanna combines limpid prose and a sound evidence-based approach to make the book a refreshing alternative to many arcane, elliptical academic tracts on the subject.

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China Modernizes

by Randall Peerenboom

Reviewed by Nicholas Bequelin

February 2008

Is China proving that developing countries are better off under an authoritarian regime that focuses on developing the economy, rather than under a democratic regime that gives emphasis to political participation? And if the enjoyment of human rights improves with economic prosperity, isnt it wiser to restrict them in the short term and allow them only once income levels take off?

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