Albert Camus wrote, "To write is to choose."
All writers embody their own cultural bags and experiences based on their life experiences and cultural upbringing.
That said, for American academics who may not be able to read in the Chinese language, including many of our so-called "China experts," or "China watchers," consider the Anglo and European books regarding the subject of China, Asia, and Islam -- at the vortex of Western paranoia.
This coming from a watcher of "China Watchers" and American so-called "China Experts" in academia.
Here's the books from a Western perspective, in English, worth reading, albeit in Camus' own admonition, with its own "cultural bags and baggages."
I know many of you have been following Michael Parenti and his blogs (google him), and Melvyn Goldstein from his Center for Research on Tibet.
But consider picking up on these books as we head towards the peak of Himalayas when the rising crescendo of Western bashing on China is expected to rise to its highest over the Beijing Olympics torch relay.
Here's my book list for those "Johnnys" "Suzies" and "Janes" in academia and intellectual circles who are not into hip stuff, cupcakes; and those "Johnny Six Packs" and "Soccer Jane Moms" who don't know where Tibet is located in the Map :
"Nixon and Mao", by Margaret MacMillan;
"The Grand Chessboard", by Zbigniew Brzezinski, "the key foreign policy adviser to Barrack Obama";
"An Eye at the Top of the World", by Pete Takeda, on the terrifying CIA project on top of Nanda Devi, in the Himalayas;
"Day of Empire", by Amy Chua, why hyperpowers rise to global dominance, and why they fall; (Ms Chua is like me, an ethnic Chinese-Filipino-American intellectual in the global Diaspora)
"The Europeanization of the World", by by John M. Headley, on the origins of human rights and democracy;
"Islamophobia", by Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg;
"America and the Islamic Bomb", by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento.
