Dartmouth Authors

Hong Kong 10 7 10 9 7 8 10 7 8 76 Tokyo 10 5 10 10 1 8 10 10 8 72 Seoul 10 7 8 8 7 6 8 8 6 68 Taipei 7 6 7 7 8 10 877 67 Singapore 10 7 10 10 2 7 5 4 7 62 Osaka 10 5 9 7 2 6 8 4 8 59 Manila 7 5 5 7 8 8 8 5 6 59 Bangkok 5 3 4 8 7 8 8 6 6 55 Jakarta 6 4 4 8 8 6 6 5 6 55 Beijing 3 5 6 6 6 5 3 10 8 53 Canton 6 5 6 8 7 6 3 3 5 49 Kuala Lumpur 7 5 5 8 3 6 3 5 4 46 Brunei 8 8 4 8 3 6 1 4 4 46 Shanghai 2 3 4 1 9 2 3 6 2 32

Robert K. McCabe '51 has made what he admits is a "clearly doomed attempt" to rate cities on a one-to-ten scale from the business traveler's perspective. (From "Asia: Guide to Business Travel.")

Lost in Hong Kong

Robert K. McCabe '51, corporate editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris, has written Asia: Guide to Busiriess Travel (Passport Books). A veteran of the Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek, McCabe lived in Asia for more than 30 years. With the help of fellow Tribune correspondents he has filled his guide with tidbits ranging from the useful to the bizarre—including a Manila nightclub named Hobbit House that is staffed with dwarves; Tokyo Disneyland, where old women are "kitted out in fine old kimonos and big black mouse ears"; and the Bridge Over the River Kwai, where Japanese buy commemorative tee shirts.

Asia is rapidly growing in world influence, reports McCabe. The result is a flurry of domestic change, as the passage below illustrates.

It is the cities of Asia, not the countrysides, that have altered most dramatically. And it was in Hong Kong, where I'd lived for half the Sixties, that I was comprehensively struck by this phenomenon. "This is my turf," I announced to Sandra as we stepped off the Star Ferry onto Hong Kong Island. "You'll love it."

I was lost in less than two minutes.

Self-Fulfilled Poverty

Why is it that nations with similar resources, geographical position, size and population are so widely divergent in wealth and political stability? Why, for instance, is Australia so much richer than Argentina, Costa Rica than Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic than Haiti, the United States than Spanish America? Lawrence E. Harrison '53 believes that a country's destiny is determined by its culture. In the book, Underdevelopment Is a Stateof Mind—The Latin American Case (University Press of America), Harrison argues that Latin America's plight owes to its culturewhich is essentially anti-democratic, antisocial, anti-progress, anti-entrepreneurial, and, at least among the affluent, anti-work.

Harrison documents his thesis with his own experience of 20 years with the United States Agency for International Development, including a stint in Nicaragua during the first two years of the Sandinista regime. His book challenges the conventional wisdom that blames the rich countries for the poverty of the poor countries.

Feeling a Draft

Among the groaning bookstore shelves that contain references on writing, there are precious few guides that actually show how a writer works. Writing from Scratch: The Essay (Hamilton Press) is that rare book that demonstrates while it dictates. Author John Clark Pratt '54 not only tells the reader how to write an essay; he also shows it, as he says, "by having you watch me work, suffer and struggle with the writing process." His method is to compose before the reader a personal essay—"one that ended up a little more personal than I'd at first intended," he confesses.

Pratt shows his work from original scrawl to reassuringly awful typing to the finished work—an essay on his first love, which also happens to include a bit of his second ("then, during the third week of that summer vacation, I managed to fall quickly and just as irrevocably in love with another girl whose name I think was Anne").

Pratt, a former Air Force officer, is now professor of English at Colorado State University. He is the author of six books, among them fhe instructional work The Meaning of Modern Poetry, the novel The Laotian Fragments, and the memoir Vietnam Voices: Perspectives on the War Years 1941-1982.

Law and Freedom

"Beneath the surface of an apparently inconsequential dispute" between legal positivism and the philosophy of natural law, writes Lloyd L. Weinreb '57, "there lingers the central puzzle of the human situation." Weinreb, who is a law professor at Harvard, is the author of Natural Law and Justice (Harvard University Press). The book describes the belief in natural law, which argues that law is inherently tied to morality; legal positivism, on the other hand, separates laws from ethics. The current controversy in jurisprudence limits itself to the rather technical question whether an unjust law is by its nature not a law, or whether such a law simply ought not to be obeyed but is nonetheless still a law. Weinreb, who is a law professor at Harvard, asserts that the roots of this debate lie in basic questions of human freedom, in which "more is at stake" than legal punctilios.

Heroic Doom

Henry Hart '76, professor of English at The Citadel, is the author of The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill (Southern Illinois University Press). The book is the first comprehensive analysis of one of England's most difficult poets, a man whose work depicts "combatants who pursue salvation with a tenacity which often brings destruction to victor and victim alike," Hart writes.