50 plus 2:The Second World by Parag Khanna
After many fits and starts I finally finished Parag Khanna's The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order. This is a very good book. Khanna, a director at the New American Foundation as well as a former Brookings Institution fellow, takes the reader on a sweeping and informative overview of the "second world" -a diverse group of countries bracketed on one side by the United States, western Europe and the Anglophone nation of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the heavily impoverished, civil war-torn nations like those found chiefly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Khanna's book makes an excellent companion to other fine books on global affairs such as Fareed Zakaria's Future of Freedom, Kishore Mahbubani's The New Asian Hemisphere and Ralph Peters' Wars of Blood and Faith. Khanna's concluding chapter on where the world might be going, including some rather disturbing words about the relative decline of US strength and vitality in itself makes this book a must read. If you wanna know what is going on in the world, read Khanna's book.
