Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia - Hardcover

Kristof, Nicholas D.; Wudunn, Sheryl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375403256 ISBN 13: 9780375403255

Publisher: Knopf, 2000

Synopsis

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.  

About this title

Review:

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists for The New York Times and authors of China Wakes, return with an eclectic collection of reportage from Asia. Thunder from the East lacks an overarching thesis, except perhaps the claim that Asia is an incredibly important part of the world whose influence will only grow in the 21st century. (Toward the end of the book, in an amusing speculation about the year 2040, the authors wonder about "the Indian landing on Mars, the Kim's Riceburger acquisition of McDonald's, and now this basketball loss" of the Americans to the Chinese in the Olympics.) Kristof and WuDunn are a husband-and-wife team who split up their writing duties; every chapter is individually bylined, with the exception of the jointly authored final one. They refuse to offer a grand unified theory of Asia, a region, they write, that is "a bit like the weather: so diverse that it is difficult to generalize about." Instead, they paint chapter-length portraits of various Asian subjects, and often in the first person. In an opening set of remarks, Kristof describes how he and WuDunn have lived in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and Japan: "Our experience across Asia was in the form that the Chinese call qingting dian shui, meaning the way a dragonfly skits superficially about the surface of a pond."

There's nothing superficial about their reporting--it probes deep and isn't afraid to draw large lessons. Kristof, for example, discusses how China and India's historic insularity have kept those two countries from achieving all they might--cases of "imperial understretch," he calls them, in a nice phrase--and suggests the United States may be entering a similar period. Thunder from the East sparkles with this kind of analysis: provocative, debatable, and worth thinking over. Its riches aren't apparent from a cursory examination, but only through a page-by-page reading. Those who make the effort will be glad they took the time. --John J. Miller

From the Publisher:

"[A] deftly woven and gracefully written book by a Pulitzer Prize-winning husband-and-wife team.... Using individual lives to examine countries ranging from Japan to Singapore, Kristof and WuDunn convincingly argue that Asia's current economic crisis is just a blip in the continent's more-than-half-century ascent toward economic power.... Images...will remain with the reader long after this gem of a book is placed back on the shelf...Eye-opening."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375403256
• ISBN 13: 9780375403255
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400