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To Mr. Gunther Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek is the "strongest man China has produced for generations, and a terrific disciplinarian. . . . Chiang is the symbol, the personification, the cement, of Chinese unity and resistance against Japan." The famous and thoroughly publicized, U. S.-educated Soong family—three sisters, three brothers, two brothers-in-law—represents "one of the most striking agglutinations of personal power in the world." Soong Meiling, Mme Chiang Kaishek, the "most brilliant of the three sisters," is the "second most powerful personage in China," i.e., after her husband. Warily Author Gunther halfway predicts a long stalemate in the war, the Japanese trying merely to hold what they have. "But they must face the united and regenerated force of the Chinese nation," he adds. "They are fighting a people that have never before been permanently beaten."
Outside of Asia's war personalities, Mr. Gunther was most fascinated by the Mahatma M. K. Gandhi, an "incredible combination of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall and your father"; Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, an "Indian who became a westerner; an aristocrat who became a socialist; an individualist who became a great mass leader"; Emir Abdullah, of Trans-Jordan, who for laughs keeps a big concave-convex mirror in the entrance hall of his palace in Amman.
In collecting his material Mr. Gunther spent eight months touring Asia. Commented the London Evening Standard long before Inside Asia was completed: "In pre-war days a lifetime of study and devotion was supposed to be necessary to acquire even a bowing acquaintance with the Orient. Although Mr. Gunther has all the conveniences of modern travel at his command, there may be many who will think that the shortness of his sojourn scarcely justifies so ambitious a title." But Mr. Gunther also has countless reliable friends—politicians, newspapermen, informants—who are more than willing to pump him full of biographical detail, information, gossip, anecdotes, wherever he goes. A crack journalist, he is indefatigable in collecting facts, tireless in hunting out the small details. His workmanlike book is exactly what it was meant to be—a handy, popular, political guidebook of a strife-torn continent.
* Harper ($3.50).