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Pacific Destiny: Inside Asia Today

Robert Elegant
Reviewed by By Donald S. Zagoria
Spring 1990
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Robert Elegant
Crown
1990
512 pp.
$24.95

Robert Elegant, a talented journalist and fiction writer, does for East Asia what Hedrick Smith, Robert Kaiser and David Shipler did for the Soviet Union. He has authored a balanced, thoughtful and beautifully written account of the spectacular rise of East Asia to economic predominance during the past several decades. Elegant's advice to the United States, if it is to meet the Asian challenge, is to achieve coordination among industry, academia, government and finance, and to make a major psychological adjustment that gets away from "quarter-by-quarter vision."

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