New Books

AIDS in Asia



By Susan Hunter

Palgrave Macmillan/ 304 pages

Over the next two decades, the containment of Asia`s epidemics will be crucial to global stability because the region is home to 60 percent of the world`s population. AIDS in Asia is marked by four significant facts: the enormous populations involved; poor leadership; Asia`s role in the sex and drug trade; and economic conditions between states that lead to exploitation of the poorest countries in the region.

At the crucial moment when the spread of AIDS in this region is beginning to gain worldwide recognition, AIDS expert Susan Hunter makes clear the catastrophic threat AIDS poses to Asia and the world, and maps out steps that must be taken to contain it.

Fresh Lipstick



By Linda M. Scott

Palgrave Macmillan/ 368 pages

A pointed attack on feminism`s requisite style of dress, the book argues that wearing high heels and using hair curlers does not deny you the right to seek advancement, empowerment, and equality. Linda M. Scott asserts that fashion is an important mode of personal expression, not an indication of submission. She demonstrates that feminism`s dogged reduction of fashion to sexual objectification has been motivated by a desire to control other women, not free them.

This push for power has produced endless conflict from the movement`s earliest days, hindering advances in women`s rights by promoting exclusion. It is time for the "plain Jane" dress code of the revolution to be lifted, allowing all women to lead, even those wearing makeup and Manolos.

Kafka on the Shore



By Haruki Murakami

Knopf/ 448 pages

A tour de force of metaphysical reality, Kafka on the Shore is powered by two characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom.

Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle-yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.