THREE BILLION NEW CAPITALISTS By Clyde Prestowitz Basic Books PP: 321 Price: Rs 675

It's the world's largest economy, still the seat of research and innovation and, despite a growing resentment against it, pretty much the global cultural trendsetter. So why should America worry over a few thousand jobs moving to India, and China's export engine continuing to hum louder? Because, says Clyde Prestowitz, President of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington, D.C., the writing is on the wall. America's pre-eminent position is under threat, and the US government does not seem to have a strategy to counter it. Prestowitz, author of two other books, Trading Places and Rogue Nation, points to some obvious concerns that American policy-makers are turning a blind eye to. For example, the soaring trade deficit ($650 billion in 2004), the pressure on dollar, and America's declining output in education and R&D. In contrast, he says, China, India and Russia have not just cast off their socialist yoke, but hit the capitalist road with a vengeance.

Prestowitz, a trade official in the Reagan administration, doesn't say anything radically new in this book. China's phenomenal rise-and the resultant threat to the US- has been well documented. But where he excels is in joining the dots and explaining the phenomenon in a narrative that's both lucid and compelling. It is easy to mistake Prestowitz for an alarmist, but his is really a cry for action. Citing a story from the Washington Post, he says "without some combination of special skills, higher education, and professional certification, (the average American worker) will be in danger of sliding down the ladder to low-paying service jobs with...no future".

So should you buy this book? If I were an American parent, I would be buying my back-to-college kid this fall a copy of Three Billion New Capitalists, and not a Toshiba portable computer. But even if you are an Indian parent, manager or a policy maker, you should be reading this book because in America's paranoia there's an important message for all of us.

Fix it, even if it ain't broke.

Corrigendum: Under the thumb-sized photo of Strategy Safari in Bookend dated September 11, 2005, the authors were inadvertently mentioned as Mukul Pandya and Robbie Shell. They should have been Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel. The publisher is Pearson and not Wharton School Publishing.

THE RURAL MARKETING BOOK By Pradeep Kashyap and Siddhartha Raut Biztantra PP: 380 Price: Rs 449

INDIA UNLIMITED

You can call it the Kotler of 'rural Marketing' in India, if you want, but The Rural Marketing Book is actually a textbook on everything that you wanted to know about India's rural markets: right from what defines a rural market, consumer demographics and psychographics, down to real-life case studies on all the marketing 'Ps', product, price, place and promotion.

Long-time rural market evangelists, authors Pradeep Kashyap and Siddhartha Raut have managed to pack in quite a bit of data on rural infrastructure, market dynamics, and media to make the book relevant for not just management students but even big company executives trying to navigate a marketplace comprising 742 million consumers. The book even delves into all hues of rural finance-organised, unorganised, micro-credit, kisan credit card, chit funds etc.

The book, whose foreword is written by former HLL chairman M.S. Banga, is certainly not a weekend read. It is more text-bookish in tone and tenor (although that's no reason why the product