This is a mediocre potboiler of scant significance. One suspects that these Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters for The New York Times know a great deal more about Asia than they convey in these pages, but this blurry collage of vignettes, anecdotes, one-dimensional portraits, self-indulgent asides and wince-inducing comments don't make for a coherent or compelling portrait of the region.
Readers of The New York Times or the International Herald Tribune should know that they will be revisiting familiar ground in this book as the authors have extensively recycled their previously published reporting from the latter half of the 1990s.
The sprawling subject -- Asia -- is the main problem. There is no way to do justice to the considerable diversity in the region and, contrary to the authors' assertions, there is no perceptible advantage in sacrificing depth for breadth because the wide-angle view in "Thunder from the East" is often out of focus and obscures large hunks of Asia from the field of view.