Pacific University Books

We get an analysis of NZ's foreign policy issues in the last few years. The globalising in the title is not confined to purely economic matters of offshoring. Some chapters delve into the effects of the WTO on NZ's trade activities. But most of the book concerns NZ's activities in the Pacific. Its foreign policies have been distinct from Australia's. In part reflecting historical tendencies to assert a separate identity from a much larger and economically dominant neighbour.

Thus one chapter describes how in the Bougainville unrest, NZ was able to play a more honest broker role than Australia. Since Australia had historically maintained close ties with the Moresby government, the rebels in Bougainville regarded Australia as too biased to act as an effective peacemaker.

Another chapter deals with the contentious arena of French nuclear testing. NZ took strong exception to this, and we see the amount of diplomatic effort expended was considerable.

This book, edited by an ex-IITian who is now a prolific evangelist of the
Net, promises us "snapshots" about what the Internet is doing in five Asian
countries and Australia. Using essays submitted by people who understand the
issues -- from South Korea, China, Singapore and Australia.

"This book," argues editor Dr Madanmohan Rao , is the first
to chronicle and dissect the unique role that the Asia-Pacific region is
playing today in the domain of the Internet economy, particularly during the
current transition."

Given the perfectionism with which he works, 'The Asia-Pacific Internet
Handbook: Episode IV -- Emerging Powerhouses' edited by Dr Madanmohan Rao
comes close to that aim.

Besides looking at the current state of the Net in these five countries --
three from the Far East, India and Australia -- this book also has a general
introduction that raises a number of interesting questions.

For instance: Are Asian countries, companies and citizens lagging behind
their counterparts in the US and Europe in Internet adoption, while yet
leading in some pockets? How fast is 'e-culture' permeating through the
region's corporate and government circles? And what is the human dimension
of the Internet economy across the ASia-Pacific, especially in these times
of the dotcom bust?

Rao traces the growth of the Internet in Asia in four episodes -- the birth
of the early computing infrastructure in Asia (1960-1980), the rise of the
early Internetworks, the academic Internet, and the Asia-Pacific Network
Information Centre (1980-1995), the rise of the commercial Internet and
datacom deregulation and early wireless networks in Asia (1995-2000) and the
rise of emerging Internet powerhouses of Asia, including the countries
covered (starting c. 2001).

"With a population of over three billion people, the 23 countries comprising
the Asia-Pacific region represents a rapidly growing and lucrative segment
of the global Internet market," argues Rao. But one could question how
evenly spread the potential is. Can Japan -- leading the West in a number of
trends -- be treated in the same basket as other lagging-behind parts of Asia?

Dr Madanmohan Rao is one of those IITians who went West, returned back home
early, and is going great guns in focussing on the promise of the Internet
here. His background, as varied as his writings, have taken him to
journalism (at the UN bureau of Inter Press Service), and even being
vice-president of IndiaWorld at Mumbai.

Still in his thirties, the Bangalore-based writer has dabbled in an eclectic
range of interests, even while taking part in the Internet lecture circuit
in some 40 countries across the globe. This, and writing skills untypical of
the techie, make him eminently suited to put together this volume.

Interestingly, his own e-mail address is digitalnomad at hotmail.com. An apt
address for someone who roams the world like the current-day version of an
experience-hungry sixteenth century conquistador who has suddenly discovered
a whole new world out there.

(His story of how he shifted from a geeky, techie subject to studying the
politics of communications -- thanks to the 1990-91 Gulf war and the type of
coverage it kept getting particularly in the West -- is surely
interesting... But that's perhaps off-topic here.)

For this book, one rushed straight to the chapter on India, which begins
with an enigmatic quote -- "The orange that is squeezed too hard yields
bitter juice. Indian proverb translated from Kannada."

This chapter builds interesting pen-pictures, using a journalistic style to
which Madan is no stranger. For instance, there's Ajit Balakrishnan, CEO of
India's leading e-commerce site Rediff.com started by an ad agency of a
similar name. Working out of Mumbai, Balakrishnan replies to "a thousand
e-mails a day" from 3 to 6 am ... even before the sun rises.

Madan tackles the issues that matter -- connectivity, content, community,
capacity, culture.... ("In terms of content, the number of websites focusing
on India is estimated to be around 250,000, mostly in English, followed by
Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati and Kannada.") This is information.
This reviewer struggled to find some 2001 websites, when putting together a
compiliation of the same at the turn of the millenium (See
http://www.bytesforall.org/i2001.html)

Even a cursory glance throws up some interesting snippets:

* India is an extremely content-rich country with a very
free press climate, unlike some of its other
Asian counterparts: the news, culture, entertainment,
sports and medical knowledge base of this country can
easily sustain dozens of portals and vortals for a
content-hungry consumer marketplace consisting of
domestic users, NRIs (non-resident Indians, numbering
20 million in over 120 countries around the world),
international businesses, and enthusiastic Indophiles.

* The Indian PC market differs from other Asian markets
in more than just its low rate of PC penetration.
It is dominated by local assemblers rather than
national vendors like Legend in China (which enjoys a
26 per cent market share) and Samsung in Korea.

* Indian PC shipments, according to IDC, were worth
about 1.88 million in 2000-01, but will grow to a
fifth of the Asia-Pacific sales (excluding Japan)
by 2004. In 2004, Indian PC sales are expected to
be 7.5 million. (Will it really?)

* For a country of a thousand million-plus, just 0.7 million
modems were sold in 2000-01.

* India is likely to experience, perhaps as no other
country has, an explosion of cybercafes in the
new millennium. Many people can afford Rs 30 (around
70 cents -- now the figure is one-third that) to
check their e-mail for half an hour every few days
in the local cybercafe instead of owning their own
PCs and Internet accounts.

* Many Internet consumers in India are beginning to
derive significant local benefits by accessing local
content on the Web; sub-national content is beginning
to appear on sites dedicated to specific cities
and states (e.g. Goa, Kerala).

Other chapters in this book, as mentioned above, deal with the Internet in
Japan, South Korea, China, Australia and Singapore.

Madan writes to shape opinions and mould the future shape the new domains
like the Net could take on. He obviously cares about who reads his output;
and is one of those using his skills and knowledge to network people and
help find solutions that make a difference.

His last co-authored book (with Osama Manzar and Tufail Ahmad) was The
Internet Economy of India, 2001. Reading this book was like browsing a
website -- it was catchy enough as a website, and as informative as one
would expect a book to be.

This new book is both informative and interesting. It's published in 2002 by
Tata McGraw-Hill. See www.tatamcgrawhill.com/digital_solutions/madan Other
contributors are IDG News Service's Tokyo correspondent Martyn Williams,
Softbank Research (South Korea) senior analyst Jin Young Kim, ZDNet Korea
Inc general manager Ms Jihee Nam, telecom consulting firm BDA China managing
director Duncan Clark, and co-founder of Editor.com Australia Grant Butler.

-------------------
The Asia-Pacific Internet Handbook
Madanmohan Rao (Ed.)
Tata McGraw-Hill
2002
ISBN 0-07-044519-2
Pp 370.

Review as found in International Journal, Volume LIV No.4 Autumn, 1999. by Stephen Heeney

By bringing together participants in two networks of scholars specializing in various aspects of the relations between, and among, the United States, Japan and Canada, the editors of this volume have done a service to those seeking to understand the issues. They rightly claim that the book assembles the insights of scholarly specialists in Canada, the Untied States, and Japan across the disciplinary expanses of economics, business, law, diplomacy, political science, and geography.

The book has had a long genesis. It began with a conference in Tokyo in 1993(founded in the form of the Canada Japan Research Award), the publication in Japanese in 1995 of some of the articles (that volume won the Canadian Prime Minister's Award for Publishing in Japan), and now the current book which includes revised and updated versions of the original, together with new contributions. The volume is especially helpful in situating Japan within the conjuncture of three friendly countries in the north Pacific, and this it does very well.

While the reflection and consciousness-raising provided through this process are evident, the disadvantage is that some of the material and judgments could be dated, especially as the book went to press last year. It is gratifying to note that the contributors have largely avoided this pitfall. However, some contributors on more immediate issues suffer from data no more recent than 1995. More serious is the occasional jarring reference to a `declining' of the United States from which some conclusions as to relative weights of the United States, Japan and Europe are drawn. Decline of the political and economic variety may have been perceived in the United States early in the decade though it has scarcely been a factor since.

The presentation of a north Pacific triangle is perhaps overdrawn. The title does beg a glance at J.B. Brebner's classic North Atlantic Triangle (1946) which shows relationships on a scale that is simply not present among the United States, Japan, and Canada. Several articles in the volume are, rightly in my view, not about a triangle at all and treat strictly bilateral issues. There is plenty of room to make constructive contributions to the understanding of the extend and complexity of Japan/USA and USA/Canada relations.

To a sometime practitioner of Canada's bilateral relations with Japan, the interesting issue is why people Japan/Canada relations are not richer or more tightly managed than they are. Or, given that they are friendly and profitable, does it matter (as one author asks)? There is an inclination here to give less credit to Canadian leadership than it deserves. Occasionally there are references to the Eurocentrism of prime ministers from Quebec, or to the Liberal Party's enthusiasm for China, as perhaps detracting from a more important relationship with Japan. This ignores, however, the implications of efforts under Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, from the early 1970s, to engage the Japanese more seriously. It was under Brian Mulroney, a Progressive Conservative prime minister from Quebec, that Canada constructed in Tokyo an embassy complex second only to that in Washington, DC, and vastly cheaper because of the creative partneship with Japanese. Mulroney persuaded his Japanese counterpart to agree to the Canada Japan Forum 2000 (the subject of an article in this volume) and placed Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed at the head of a distinguished Canadian Panel. Going back in time, it was Liberal government that established diplomatic representations in Japan (1929) at the same time as it did in France. It is also a fact that prime ministers must spend more time on Canada's relationship with the United States than with any other single nation or issue, and have limited time to pursue other priorities very consistently, whether Europe, Japan, or China. And, let's face it, Eurocentrism and a fascination with China have been fairly widely shared by Canadians through out Canada.

This book is an interesting collection of papers on what the book title calls "environmental history", but what might be better characterized as human-environment interactions, human-ecology, or human-landuse, since that is what most of the essays focus upon. This is a good book for anyone interested in the history of landuse and environmental change in the Northwest.

The readings are aimed at a scholarly audience, so the tempo, tone, and diction are more like "academic" writing and less like "popular" writing. In other words: this book is not always a fast and easy read (this is why I didn't give it 5 stars). Another small criticism: due to the format of the endnotes, I sometimes found it difficult to track down the original references mentioned in the text.

All in all -- important information and a useful book, definitely of regional interest.

This book by Huser provides an insightful glimpse of one of the most famous riverine explorations in American history. By defly flipping between historic journal interpretations and personal riverine reflections, Huser provides an incredibly rewarding and fun read, informed from his long experience with, and intimate knowledge of, America's wild waterways. For these reasons, I was very grateful that Huser accepted an invitation from my publisher (Green Frigate Books) to write one of the front-end blurbs for the recently published Deep Immersion: The Experience of Water.

To a reader already interested in the culture of the Pacific, this is an instructive and enjoyable read. It shows the diversity of traditions, as expressed in the artworks, of a relatively small absolute number of people, scattered across a vast region.

The Polynesian influences may perhaps be familiar to an American reader. Especially if you are from Hawaii or California. You can see the origins of all those cheesy tiki memorabilia from the 50s and 60s. The photos of the carvings and fabrics are an integral part of the narrative. Giving an appreciation of the skills needed.

I checked this book out from the library and didn't get around to reading it. I'm "reviewing" this anyway because it bugs me when there is absolutely nothing on the product description page that tells me what the book is about. So here it is, straight from the jacket flaps:

"A new view of western history is emerging, one that recognizes the experiences and contributions of all peoples who lived in or came to the American West. 'Pacific Northwest Women,' a remarkable collection of stories, essays, memoirs, letters, and poems, contributes to this new understanding and challenges many myths about women who lived and worked - and wrote - in the West.

"This anthology gives voice and interpretation to the experiences of a diverse group of thirty women, all of whom lived in Oregon and Washington. The editors, in addition to asking how race, class, and gender affected these women's experiences, examine what role this particular geographic region played in shaping their lives.

"The selections, some of which have never before been presented to contemporary readers, are arranged according to four themes: connecting with nature, coping with circumstances, caregiving to others, and communicating for the self and others. In addition to providing biographical information on each author, the editors also explore the modern-day concept of empowerment in the experiences of these women."

This book has an insider's perspective on the path UOP has taken through its history. Much is said on the Alumni Association and the move from San Jose to Stockton.

That South Pacific Nations have faced, and continue to face, difficulties moving from `traditional' cultures to colonies and now to `developing' postcolonial nation states is undeniable. This book addresses some specific issues arising out of tensions between the legal, political and social systems of indigenous cultures and their introduced colonial counterparts. This conflict between, and co-existence of, introduced and traditional cultures and legal systems is effectively portrayed throughout the text through a number of interesting and thought provoking cases. The contributors present their analysis and insights in a highly readable and accessible style. The result is a stimulating introduction to Pacific Jurisprudence.

Passage of Change is the work of 13 authors who have each contributed a single chapter, or in some cases two chapters. The book is primarily designed for, and used as, a text for a 4th year LLB subject at the University of the South Pacific, where most of the contributors currently or have previously taught. Student orientated features include; definition sections prior to each chapter for key terms and phrases and the inclusion of review questions and suggested further readings at the end of each section. While the text is designed with students in mind, it is suitable to a much larger audience. The editors, in the introduction, recommend it to policy makers, aid donors, and others interested in contemporary issues facing Pacific island legal systems and societies.

Because it is written by a number of different contributing authors it doesn't have the flow or continuity one would normally find in a text book. However this is probably to be expected given the book covers such a broad range of issues and perspectives.

The book is broken up into sections, each covering a distinct topic from differing perspectives looking both at theoretical issues and practical problems. Each section has between one and three chapters. The sections being:

1. The Context of Change
2. Corruption
3. Customary Law
4. Human Rights
5. Natural Resource Issues
6. Rebuilding Nation States

Two central questions appear to run through many of the topics covered:

* Whether `western' concepts such as human rights, good governance, and environmental sustainability are incompatible with Customary Law in the different Pacific island societies?; and
* What is, or should be, the role of customary law in postcolonial societies?

In addressing these and other questions the authors focus on broad issues (ie. corruption and corruption) and also specific aspects (ie. the role of the Ombudsman in Vanuatu).

Taken as a whole, this is an excellent primer on some pressing issues confronting the various Pacific Island countries and their legal systems.

This boook present what is, I think, one of the few GOOD ethnographies on Indo-Fijians. I say that, not because Mayer's analysis of Indo-Fijian culture is particularly helpful, but because the descriptions he provides of Indian life in Fiji are excellent source material for the scholar and the interested reader alike. I used this book as on of my main sources for a thesis at UC Berkeley, and I found the wedding scenes to be particularly helpful, but so too are the funeral rites, the holidays, and, of course, the pictures are nice. If you are looking for a simple, straight-forward analysis of Indo-Fijians and their culture, look elsewhere. Mayer is trapped in the stereo-types of his day and a lot better analyses now exists on different facets of Indo-Fijian life. In particular, there are many good articles now available, researched and written in the last ten years.