Skip to main content

The Elephant and the Dragon by Robyn Meredith

A survey of the development and modernization of China and India. Written by a reporter for Forbes with a disappointingly light grasp of economics and trade. The numbers, data and statistics will be interesting, even shocking, to anyone new to reading about these emerging economies. Unfortunately, if you're already conversant in what's going on over there, the book may read like an unstructured collection of obligatory factoids.

The Elephant and the Dragonwould make a solid "first book" to a reader new to the issues on China and India, but I'm casting about for a book on the topic that is more predictive and insightful. Does anyone have any good suggestions?

The author argues that the US has a lot to fear from China or India. I'm sure the same fear-based mentality raged in England in the 1800s when the US passed England as the world's largest economy. Last I checked, however, England is still there and wealthier than ever.

Further, Meredith uses so many examples of "on the one hand/on the other hand" thinking that I walked away from the book wondering which side of this issue she really stood on.

That said, I did learn a few things from this book, in particular how ignorant and incompetent Mao, Gandhi and Nehru were on economic issues and how their ideologies handicapped their countries for decades.



Addendum (8/10/08): I'm going to add to this post a reading list of potentially interesting books for further reading. In general, I'll select the most interesting sounding titles listed in the bibliography (if there is one) or other notable book titles mentioned or drawn from by the author the text itself.

In the future, I'll do this for any book that provides titles that would be of interest to readers looking to pursue any of the book's subjects on a deeper level. As always, if you have feedback or suggestions for titles, you can leave a comment on this or any post. Also, you can always reach me privately here at dan1529[at]yahoo[dot]com.

Reading list for The Elephant and the Dragon:
One quick comment: Most of these books are likely much more interesting and influential than this book itself!

1) India Unbound Gurcharan Das
2) Making Globalization Work Joseph Stiglitz
3) From Third World to First : The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 Lee Kuan Yew
4) Billions: Selling to the New Chinese Consumer Tom Doctoroff
5) One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China James McGregor
6) The Fords: An American Epic Peter Collier and David Horowitz
Labels:

More Posts

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn is really two books: a good one and a bad one. The good one, the first fifteen or sixteen chapters, is engaging, original and beautiful. The second book, the bad one, is hackneyed, inorganic, farcical, and in places nearly unreadable.  It feels like the overall work was written by two different people, which in fact it more or less was: the Mark Twain of 1876, fresh off the tremendous success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and the Mark Twain of seven years later, cramped with financial stress and writer's block. Thus the back two-thirds of the book feels more like a collection of vaguely related short stories than a coherent novel, with random characters entering and exiting the stage to resuscitate an increasingly cadaverous plot. Twain is even forced to wedge Tom Sawyer back into the story late in the book, thanks to one of American literature's least plausible coincidences. It brings to mind Virginia Woolf's famously condescending remark about the no...
Read more

Understanding Human Nature by Alfred Adler

A difficult book, in part because Adler isn't all that good at expressing his ideas: he's a practitioner, not a writer, and it shows. Further, I believe Understanding Human Nature has more in direct value than direct value: the reader has to move from what the book teaches to a layer of second-order insights. I'll explain what I mean in a moment. First a quick summary of the book's core themes and ideas. According to Adler, we all have a psyche, formed and largely fixed in childhood, and that psyche has an ulterior psychological goal. For most of us, unfortunately, that goal takes the form of striving for power, control, attention, or superiority. Throughout the book Adler gives examples where peoples' psyche-driven strivings cause suffering, both for themselves as well as everyone else in their blast radius. Most of us will likely resist Adler's claim that to understand other people and their motivations you must first understand their psyches' "ulter...
Read more

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Fun, engaging novel about a very intelligent--and very naughty--boy. If we're lucky, we will all have a little bit of Tom Sawyer in us: we all misbehave, we all show off, we all counted the interminable minutes until recess, and we all have our little schemes and connivances. Nobody remembers the boys who behave themselves all the time. There's some subtlety to Twain's writing too at times: we see a good example in Chapter 6, when Tom is late to school. [1] You have to read with fairly close attention to note that Tom sees an empty seat, the only empty seat, next to Becky Thatcher on the girls' side of the classroom. He was thinking several steps ahead, and this was exactly why he spontaneously admits to his teacher, loudly, that his tardiness was due to talking to the town's black sheep, Huck Finn. He did it because he knew the teacher would put him on the girls' side of the schoolroom, right next to Becky! [A quick affiliate link to Amazon for those readers...
Read more