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Home » Book ReviewsThe REVIEW’s editors and contributors review the books about the region you need to know about. Over the month, we gradually post the reviews from the last issue of the REVIEW in this free section, as well as additional reviews.
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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