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The Pacific Century: America and Asia in a Changing World

Frank Gibney
Reviewed by By Donald Zagoria
Spring 1993
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Frank Gibney
Charles Scribner's Sons
1992
596 pp.
$40.00

This is a broad, rich survey of the Pacific that is well-written, insightful about all the major issues of economics, society and politics, rooted in history, full of scholarly references and lavishly illustrated with photographs. The author, who has written five books on Asia, is a veteran observer of East Asia who has spent a lifetime traveling in and writing about the region. He is now president of the Pacific Basin Institute in Santa Barbara, California, and one of America's foremost experts on the region.

This volume should become a standard text for college courses on East Asia and for the general reader interested in going deeper than the usual journalistic survey. It needs also to be read by the "Atlanticists" in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, who have consistently neglected a region that is destined to play a much greater role in shaping world affairs.

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