cover image Somebody Else's Century: How Asia Is Shaping the Future of the West

Somebody Else's Century: How Asia Is Shaping the Future of the West

Patrick Smith, Pantheon, $25.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-375-42550-9

Written explicitly for a Western audience, this searching and philosophical text eschews the demographic and statistics-driven approach to the rise of Asia, opting instead for an essayistic and existential meditation on modernity and modernization. Smith (The Nippon Challenge) focuses on China, India, and Japan and skips nimbly between topics as varied as raids on an Indian temple dating back a millennium, the impact of the Opium Wars on China's development, and Nietzsche's reflections on travel and "the foreign." The author examines each country's relationship to economic transformation and to their pasts, describing the new century as a "post-Western" era, one in which Westerners will confront the challenge that this book suggests has largely defined the contemporary Asian experience, the sense of living in an era that does not belong "to us." This demanding, rich book provides few answers, but offers a valuable intellectual frame for approaching the evolving relationship between the East and the West. (Sept.)