China will soon overtake the United States as the world's largest economy, India is stirring from its long hibernation, and Japan is leading the world in robots and consumer technologies such as the on-line refrigerator that will change the way ordinary people live. For the last five centuries, the most important things going on in the world have taken place in Europe or America; in the twenty-first century, partly thanks to the Asian economic crisis that forced long overdue corrections, restructuring, and reform, the focus of change may again be in Asia.

This is not just a story of a continent, however, but also the tale of people -- those whom the authors encountered as they lived and worked in Asia as Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondents for the New York Times. They tell of the Thai girl who has forgiven her grandmother for selling her to a brothel; of the Indonesian mobs who searched the countryside for "sorcerers" to torture and kill; of the scorned Korean-Japanese rebel who has emerged as a multimillionaire and one of the world's leading Internet kingpins; even of their own children being brainwashed to become perfect little citizens in Japanese schools. This is a marvelously revealing, highlyinformed, surprising and lively portrait of a continent transforming itself as its global role increases exponentially.