IMPORT OF BANDUNG

...These two books, both written by Southerners who are also world citizens, can give us the understanding we need of certain basic facts which the world calendar no longer permits us to evade...

...Since this is the first reporting of the Bandung Conference available to Americans in book form, it demands wide reading quite aside from the special insights its author gives...

...Nor does he have adequate background for dealing fully with certain other phases of his subject, which could have come to him only through prolonged study of the philosophical and cultural history of Asia's peoples...

...But remember that Mr...

...The book is written in a simple, straightforward manner...

...This he does well...

...Perhaps the author is justified in leading us slowly through the shallow waters before plunging us with him into the turbulent scenes of the conference itself...

...it was the first time in their downtrodden lives that they'd seen so many of their color, race, and nationality arrayed in such aspects of power, their men keeping order, their Asia and their Africa in control of their destinies . . . They were getting a new sense of themselves, getting used to new roles and new identities...

...As Wright views it: "Here was a chance for China to surround herself with men and nations who had suffered at the hands of colony-owning Western states, and, since the United States had not disavowed its support of such states, China then could walk as a fellow guest into an anti-Western house built by a reaction to colonialism and racialism...

...Wisely, he does not dwell on these matters...

...If the West spurns this call, what will happen...

...This reviewer, who was in India for five months directly preceding the Bandung Conference, feels that Wright's still briefer visit to Asia gave him insufficient knowledge of the backstage maneuverings which took place among some of the leaders before, during, and after the Conference...

...It was a gift from the skies...

...He does not attempt here to weigh our capacity or our desire to choose wisely and creatively...

...Chou En-lai stands there, waiting, patient, with no record of racial practices behind him . . . He will listen...

...Reviewed by Paula Snelling TN The Color Curtain Richard -1 Wright gives us a good journalistic account of an extraordinary and significant event...

...He makes plain the fateful choice the West must make, and the brevity of the time-span we have to make it in...

...Wright shows Chou En-lai shrewd and flexible enough to size up the unanticipated emotional complexities of the conference and discard his short-sighted prepared political speech in favor of extemporized words worthy of a statesman with higher goals than are his own...

...The first half, interesting though it is and in which Wright takes on the job of transporting the reader from the psychological background of the West to that of the East, carries considerably less weight than do the last hundred pages...

...And as a first-class writer he has been able to convey its basic impact and much of its import...

...The West . . . must be big enough, generous enough, to accept and understand that bitterness...

...By the time he has "oriented" us, we of the West are more nearly ready to give that word the new and deep significance it holds for our common future...

...It was my belief that the delegates at Bandung, for the most part, though bitter, looked and hoped toward the West...

...For a deeper understanding of the complex forces which have erected barriers so high in the minds of many Westerners that they cannot see the implications of this Asian-African situation, the reader should turn to Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream...

...Wright sums up his impressions: "I repeat and underline that the document was addressed to the West, to the moral prepossessions of the West...

...He has something more urgent to tell us...

...For he is equipped, both as an intellectual and as a colored American (Mississippi-born), to grasp the primary meaning of the sweeping undercurrents from the past and of today's headwinds which combined to create the human tidal wave he witnessed in Indonesia last spring...

...And as he does so, he gives us ample evidence that the inhabitants of this globe, from humblest to highest and without regard for geography, are headed toward a future quite different from their past...

...He gives us a glimpse of the throng outside the conference site: "Day in and day out these crowds would stand in this tropic sun, staring, listening, applauding...

...I don't know...

...Wright's intentions are to show us the effects of the myth of white superiority upon Asia and Africa...