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From two Pulitzer Prize-winning New
York Times correspondents, a cutting-edge report on
Asia and how its people are reshaping the world.
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn bring
to their revelatory book all the authority and insight of
the fourteen years they spent covering Asia. They depict
a continent poised to reassume the role it ceded five hundred
years ago as the "center of the world." They muster
convincing evidence that China may soon overtake the United
States as the world's largest economy, that India is awakening
from its long hibernation, that Japan is developing future
consumer technologies that will benefit millions of people.
Kristof and WuDunn tell their story through
vivid descriptions of the unforgettable characters they
have encountered: the Cambodian girl sold by her parents
to a brothel; the bankrupted Thai entrepreneur who starts
life anew with a street-vending business; the Japanese veteran
haunted by the mother and child he killed in war. Through
lives such as these, the authors underscore the pragmatism
and perseverance that drive Koreans, Filipinos, Japanese,
and their fellow Asians to greater success, to the point
that many workers embrace the same sweatshops that horrify
Westerners.
Thunder from the East shows that
the rise of Asia paradoxically has been accelerated by the
financial crisis that began to tear through the lives of
multitudes in the East in 1997. The authors make clear that,
by radically undermining the cronyism and the suffocating
regulations that had long fettered Asian economies, the
crisis liberated energies and creativity that had until
then been immobilized.
Kristof and WuDunn avoid a Panglossian focus
on Asia's strengths, for they also emphasize such shortcomings
as discrimination against women, horrendous pollution, and
the rise of nationalism. They warn that the rise of Asia
will be a risky and tumultuous process, and that the emergence
of powers like China and India will be in many ways destabilizing.
New missile technologies and the rise of new nuclear powers
in Asia pose a greater threat to American cities as well.
Asia is, the authors warn, not only the most vibrant part
of the world today, but also the most dangerous.
Thunder from the East is a brilliant
guide to a region that is now in a position to wrest economic,
diplomatic, and military power from the West in the coming
decades. It offers a riveting account of a continent that
is fast becoming the focus of the world's attention.
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn,
husband and wife, shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for their
coverage for the New York Times of the Tiananmen
democracy movement in China and its suppression. They are
the authors of China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul
of a Rising Power. Kristof has served as Times
bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo; WuDunn was
a Times correspondent in Beijing and Tokyo, and has
specialized in business journalism. Both now work for the
Times in New York City and live nearby with their
three children.
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