Lastly, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm by long-time BBC correspondent Owen Bennett Jones (Yale) was an informed look at the country before the current warming of relations with its neighbor India.
ASIA ROUND THE WORLD
Other notable book by authors of Asian origin included Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace (Secker) and Hsu Feng-hsiung's Behind Deep Blue (Princeton).
Hong Kingston, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, is part of a long American radical tradition, if one currently in opposition. The Fifth Book of Peace, while not equal to her celebrated earlier books, evoked the mythical Three Books of Peace from ancient China in an appeal for peace in the US today.
Hsu Feng-hsiung was the man who designed and programmed the computer that beat the world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. Considering that there are said to be a larger number of possible chess games of 40 moves than there are probable atoms in the universe, and that human beings have the advantage of being unpredictable, this was no easy task. Bobby Fischer reportedly said he'd happily challenge God to a game of chess and give him a pawn advantage. Computers may not be gods, but Deep Blue appears to have come pretty close.
Staying in the US, Michael Chang in Holding Serve (Hodder and Stoughton) narrated with a unique innocence how his Christianity sustained him in the ultra-competitive, macho world of men's international tennis.
In a category all of its own was Gold Warriors by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave (Verso). This outspoken book, backed up by CDs containing over 900 megabytes of evidence, claimed to catalogue what happened to the gold Japan stripped from the peoples of Asia before and during World War II (including a reputed 6,000 tonnes from Chiang Kai-shek's treasury and the homes of the leaders of Nationalist China). It went some way to explaining why, to this day, areas in Luzon regularly witness the arrival of aged Japanese tourists with metal-detectors in their luggage.
Finally, Asia featured prominently in Jan Morris's compendium of travel essays A Writer's World: Travels and Reportage 1950 to 2000 (Faber), with items on, among other places, India, Sri Lanka and Singapore. Morris had said that her book on Trieste would be her last, so it's a pleasure to see that she's allowing collections of articles such as this to prove exceptions to her rule.
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