God, greed, politics and a rash of rabies
May
'The peasant revolutionary turned lifestyle guru, the former Shaolin monk working on a Shanghai building site, the once-conservative father running a gay hotline - and the teenagers who just want to dress up as their favourite Japanese cartoon characters. Welcome to the new China ...' So goes the cover blurb for Duncan Hewitt's Getting Rich First (Chatto & Windus).
The BBC's former China correspondent takes his title from Deng Xiaoping's pronouncement during the economic reforms of the 1980s that China would have to 'let some of the people get rich first'. Hewitt describes a nation in the throes of rapid transformation, as industrial, technological and sexual revolutions sweep away the past and Communist ideals are sacrificed at the altar of individual aspiration.
While China is busy getting rich, poor nations are preoccupied with buying nuclear weapons. William Langewiesche relates the frightening facts of nuclear proliferation in The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He chronicles the inexorable drift of nuclear weapons technology into the hands of the poor, tracing how stolen uranium and nuclear hardware are smuggled through Turkey, the 'grand bazaar for nuclear goods'.
Along the way, he examines the danger of nuclear arms falling into the hands of terrorist groups and looks at the role played by Abdul Qadeer Khan - the so-called father of the Muslim bomb, who helped build Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and peddled nuclear plans to North Korea and Iran - describing him as the 'greatest nuclear proliferator of all time'.
Langewiesche's account would have Ronald Reagan turning in his grave. The revisionist view of the 40th president's bullish cold war policy has him on a personal quest to rid the world of nuclear arms. Reagan is credited with paving the way for an end to the east- west standoff during a presidency marked by soaring prosperity, the Iran-Contra Affair and a survived assassination attempt.
The only daily diary kept by a US president, The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins), contains revealing entries on relationships with Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II, Muammar Gaddafi, and Margaret Thatcher, along with thoughts about his love for his wife, Nancy, and his belief in God and the power of prayer.