FABULOUS ASIA
Williams, John
The Progressive's Bookshelf Fabulous Asia ASIA'S LANDS AND PEOPLES, by George B. Cressey. Whittlesey House. $6.00. Reviewedtby John Williams TillS encyclopedic geography is a fine book, easily...
...Cressey has compiled this absorbing introduction to Asia...
...Prof...
...Cressey reports about Asia's potentialities which lie just beyond our Alaska-Aleutians frontier...
...The largest of the oceans is an appropriate preface to the largest of continents...
...Every word of its great range of facts is geared to the problems that today's war is creating for solution tomorrow...
...Cressey draws no conclusions...
...The book is divided into sections which deal with each country so that its peoples, resources, and problems are plainly laid bare...
...The calm, authentic text, which was double-checked by a group of American experts, is illustrated with 250 stimulating photographs and 100 ingenious maps, and the whole study is sensibly rounded out by an exhaustive catalog of suggested readings...
...He simply presents the facts, the dynamics of fabulous, stirring Asia...
...There are only 135,000,000 Americans opposite 1,500,-000.000 Asiatics...
...If you think America has great potent ialities of human and raw materials, ponder deeply what Prof...
...Some of them already have tasted white man's blood...
...The most interesting deals with the Soviet realm in Asia, our closest Asiatic neighbor and destined to be the main buffer between the Americas and the unrest and ambitions of Asia...
...From Singapore to Panama and from Bering Strait to Antarctica, lies 10,000 miles of almost empty water...
...Here is room for 257 states the size of Texas, or for 16 Chinas...
...Its opening paragraph is challenging and sets the pace for the entire 600 pages: "The Pacific is a whale of an ocean, larger by millions of square miles than all the continents combined...
...We have to learn to share it...
...The Pacific, which Americans vaguely have been taught to believe is an American ocean, belongs just as much to Asia...
...I!ig guns never made friends and we certainly need friends in Asia...
...Reviewedtby John Williams TillS encyclopedic geography is a fine book, easily the best reference on Asia—"one-third of the earth, two-thirds of its inhabitants"—that has appeared...
...Across this vast expanse the United States faces Asia...
...We can't afford to let the Big Navy boys, for example, get away with their postwar plan to patrol a line from California clear across the Pacific to Indo-China...
...We have to bridge the Pacific, the great gulf between us and Asia, with intelligence, and it is with infinite intelligence that Prof...
Vol. 8 • August 1944 • No. 35
