Freedom in Exile. The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama by Dalai LamaReview by: Patricia DorffForeign Affairs, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Spring, 1991), pp. 200-201Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20044804 .

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200 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

the communist parties to cross clear over to the market and to democracy? "all the way, not one third of the way, or half way, but all the way across."

The move forward, he contends, has to be brisk and comprehensive?a recasting of all institutions and ideas. To accomplish this, he concludes,

requires the removal as a class of the governing party elite.

CHINA EYES JAPAN. By Allen S. Whiting. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 228 pp. $29.95.

These two countries have been interacting with each other and misun

derstanding each other for a century. Do they understand each other better now than in the past? The answer seems to be no. China's under

standing of Japan is particularly deficient, according to Whiting, largely because of the imposition of an official line on scholarship and the media.

When younger Chinese scholars try to write internal papers or give lectures that challenge official thinking, they are not permitted to do so.

ALMOST A REVOLUTION. By Shen Tong. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990, 342 pp. $19.95.

After a plethora of books by Western journalists, Tong provides a much needed insider's account of the events leading up to the Tiananmen Square

massacre. As a student at Beijing University and a leader of the 1989

prodemocracy movement, Tong was in an excellent position to view firsthand those heady weeks. He describes the infighting of the student

organizations, as well as the determination and courage of the students and the Chinese people who supported their cause. More important, his book reinforces the argument, contrary to Chinese government assertions, that the prodemocracy movement was spontaneous and unplanned.

Patricia Dorff

IN A LITTLE KINGDOM. By Perry Stieglitz. Armonk (NY): Sharpe, 1990, 230 pp.

Stieglitz first visited Laos in 1959 on a Fulbright grant to teach English at a local lyc?e. He returned in 1961 as a State Department foreign service officer and would spend the rest of his life closely involved with the politics, history and culture of Laos, not least because he married in 1968 the

daughter of Prince Souvanna Phouma, one of three princes battling for

political control. His book is an account of those turbulent years?part travel memoir, part political history and part personal narrative. The combination is a touching and sad tribute to a country caught up in the Cold War years. Patricia Dorff

FREEDOM IN EXILE. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE DALAI LAMA. New York: HarperCollins, 1990, 288 pp. $22.95.

A wonderfully entertaining and fascinating book by the exiled leader of

Tibet and winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize. In an unassuming and down-to-earth style, he writes about what it means to be the living reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, the religious and secular head of Tibet. Besides the amusing stories of his childhood and upbringing in Lhasa, he discusses the 1959 Chinese invasion of Tibet and the years he has spent since then caring for his fellow Tibetan refugees and promoting world

peace through his policy of nonviolence. One comes away from this book

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RECENT BOOKS 201

with tremendous respect and admiration for this compassionate man and

spiritual leader. Patricia Dorff

Africa Gail M. Gerhart

FIGHTING YEARS: BLACK RESISTANCE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR A NEW SOUTH AFRICA. By Steven Mufson. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990, 376 pp. $24.95.

This book by a former Johannesburg correspondent of The Wall Street

Journal is a lively and intelligent contribution to the history of South Africa's transformation in the 1980s. Focusing entirely on the underre

ported black resistance efforts, the author takes the reader into the nooks of antiapartheid politics and describes with admirable objectivity what he saw and heard there. Enough of the larger national scene is sketched in to

add context to the mass of detail that illuminates everything from township theater, trade unions and black management cadets in the Anglo-American

Corporation to the military tactics of the African National Congress and the leadership rivalries of the United Democratic Front.

HOW CAN MAN DIE BETTER . . . SOBUKWE AND APARTHEID. By Benjamin Pogrund. London: Peter Halban, 1990, 406 pp. $14.95.

The notoriety of the Pan-Africanist Congress of South Africa derives

largely from its role in precipitating the Sharpeville emergency of 1960, and from the reputation of its widely admired founder-president, Robert Sobukwe (1924-78). Although the PAC, today as in 1960, bases its appeal on emotional racially defined nationalism, Sobukwe judged individuals on

their merits and maintained cordial relations with many white South Africans. The author of this biography, a former deputy editor of the

liberal Rand Daily Mail, knew Sobukwe well during the last two decades of his life. The book deals at disproportionate length with Sobukwe's rather uneventful post-Sharpeville years of imprisonment, banishment and final

illness, but it also assembles the fullest record to date of his early life and meteoric career in the late 1950s as a nationalist leader.

THE SILENT REVOLUTION IN AFRICA: DEBT, DEVELOPMENT AND DEMOCRACY. By Fantu Cheru. London: Zed Books, 1989, 189

pp. A fresh look at the African debt crisis is always welcome, but this book is

largely a recapitulation of familiar facts and arguments, over which the author has spread a thin gloss of undeveloped political prescriptions. Cheru, who teaches Development Studies at American University in

Washington, urges Africans to regard the North-South economic relation

ship as a zero-sum game in which Africa's beleaguered poor will be

perpetual victims until they exit from the grip of elite-controlled econo

mies, effect democratic revolutions, unite across national boundaries and use collective default as a weapon to force Africa's creditors to relent. It is

implausible but provocative. For heuristic purposes it is perhaps even

useful, especially its chapter-length case studies of Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia/Sudan and Zambia.

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