When a man writes with his pen dipped in vitriol, a compilation of his articles are foreordained to make the reader react. Or they might even leave her/him numb, for Israel-born Sam Vaknin is hard-hitting. He does not mince his words, calls a spade a spade and has a sardonic-laconic way of putting things across. The subtitle of After the Rain says it all: the West has, for all practical purposes, lost the East. Vaknin landed in Macedonia in 1996. Between then and 2000, he was a prolific writer who penned down his thoughts mostly in The New Presence and Central Europe Review. The essays in the book in question were published mainly in these journals during the period.

Vaknin is severely critical of the West's duplicity. He quotes Edward Thompson, managing editor of Life from 1949 to 1961, as saying, "Life must be curious, alert, erudite and moral, but it must achieve this without being holier-than-thou, a cynic, a know-it-all or a Peeping Tom." The West has violated Thompson's edict and drive Europe to the verge of war and the region it "adopted" to the verge of economic and social upheaval. Vaknin says, "The Wst lost Eastern and Southeast Europe not when it lied egregiously, not when it pretended to know for sure when it surely did not know, not when it manipulated and coaxed and coerced -- but when it failed." The panacea of free marketry cum democracy that was shoved down the throat of the countries that had just broken free from Communism could not have worked.

The West was naïve to believe that the masses who were waiting all these years to be liberated from the Communists, would one fine day revert to capitalism and onwards to development and prosperity. The West never understood how lethargic the Rip van Winkle institutions could render people. Vaknin asserts Communism "was a collaborative effort - a symbiotic co-existence of the rulers and the ruled, a mutual understanding and an all-pervasive pathology." The West failed to see through this incestuous relationship, just as they were fooled by the appearance of law and order. The courts, the police and the media were ossified skeletons that had been drained of any real power. What happened in the bargain was that one criminal association was substituted by another. More often than not these comprised the same people. "Post communist societies are sick and their institutions are a travesty." The kernel of good people here, a stifled, suppressed and mocked lot, should be the ones who must be given voices.

The socialist/communist professors of yesterday cannot be teachers of capitalism today. Intelligence and knowledge do not matter since capitalism is not a theoretical construct merely, but a way of life. Inefficiency, corruption and pathological economic thinking has castrated them emotionally and intellectually. Workers and managers of the communist era cannot function efficiently in a capitalist system for the same reason. Vaknin scoffs at Balkan intellectuals too insisting that they have no fire in them.

Vaknin derides instant education in a society where everything is up for sale; where students of economics have not heard of Kenneth Arrow and students of medicine offer sex or money or both to their professors to graduate. He delves into linguistics and semantics and argues that this is a solipsistic world where communication is permitted only with oneself and the aim of language is to throw others off the track. Vaknin examines the issue closely since he believes language is a leading indicator of the psychological and institutional health of social units.

He stresses on the imperative need to bell the cat in a system where graft and fear rule. But then the West, particularly the United States, is in a morbid habit of "creating pairs of villains and heroes, monsters and saints where there are none". He believes the wars in Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia were nothing short of gangland warfare. These were skirmishes between gangs of criminals, disguised as politicians etc. Crime prevails since free market flourishes. Criminals, after all, are private entrepreneurs.

Vaknin also writes about his impressions on the economy (or, whatever is left of it) in these liberated countries. It is, however, the essays classified under the head "The People" that are more acerbic and provocative than the ones categorised under "The Economy". Maybe, because it is finally the people who matter.

Memories of the Sixties are still afresh in the minds of many in contemporary American society. People remember what they want to remember. Democrats believe the Sixties were a golden age of government activism on behalf of the dispossessed, destroyed by the conservative white backlash of the seventies, eighties, and nineties. For Republicans, the Sixties signalled the beginning of a long moral slide in the United States and an end to governmental restraint and fiscal responsibility.

Much less is known about the Sixties than is perceived to be. Many of the popular conceptions about the time are, ironically, misconceptions. What the Sixties need today are historians. Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, radical students then and historians now, seek to interpret the tumultuous happenings of the Sixties as a politically complicated "dramatization of our humanity", and go ahead to demonstrate why and how debates on the decade continue to cleave the United States even three decades later.

Isserman, a specialist of leftist politics, and Kazin, an expert on modern conservatism, assert that what they had participated in was not mere civil disobedience, but an outright "civil war". Chapters are devoted to the civil rights movement, the Great Society, Vietnam and the antiwar movement, the New Left, youth culture, and other liberation movements). They also concentrate on specific years (1963, 1965, 1968) where political developments overlap and render interpretation and recollections difficult. What Isserman and Kazin have attempted is trying to disentangle the threads as coherently as they can.

They talk about the rise and fall of liberalism and look at an issue not much talked about by liberal-leftist historians - that of the rise of a new conservatism. Activist youths did not come from the Left alone -- there was the New right too. Liberalism was not, they say, "as powerful in the 1960s as is often assumed; nor, equally, was conservatism as much on the defensive". They dwell at length on the opposition to the Great Society programmes by conservative Republicans, urban Democrats and the underprivileged and poor.

Isserman and Kazin do write about the African-American freedom movement, the New Left, the students' movement, the women's movement. What mars the book are the handful of inexplicable gaps. The non-African Americans do not find much space in their work. Similarly, the American Indian Movement, Asian-American activism, and the GI coffee house movement have all been relegated to obscurity. For a book that seeks to be an exhaustive analysis of the Sixties, these omissions come as embarrassing irregularities.

On October 9, 1959, Tsung Tsai, a young Ch'an Buddhist monk, completed an arduous climb up the western face of Crow Pull Mountain in Inner Mongolia to bid adieu to his master, Shiuh Deng. Tsung the Puu Jih monastery the next day to escape from the rampaging Red Army. The monastery was ravaged, but Tsung trekked more than three thousand miles, guarding a book of poetry and the monk's certificate with life. To be caught in the possession of those would have meant execution. The old master could not have escaped; it was up to the young disciple to preserve and disseminate the teachings of Shiuh Deng.

Tsung made it to Hong Kong finally where he spent 12 years studying and teaching. After receiving a Rockefeller fellowship there to study at Columbia University, he moved to Woodstock, New York. Here he made friends with his neighbour, George Crane, a poet and former correspondent with foreign news agencies. Now a master himself, Tsung could never forget his own: it was in 1995 that he felt the pangs of returning to the land of Shiuh Deng, this time to search for his bones and to give him a decent ceremonial burial. Tsung, now 70, was determined this was the last time he felt those pangs.

The diminutive Ch'an monk managed to persuade his sceptic American friend that he should accompany him on the trip and write a book about the adventures that they have. He knew well that the journey would provide enough fodder to be written about. The Western obsession with the atrocities perpetrated by the Chinese, coupled with the fascination of Oriental mysticism would provide enough for a bestseller. Crane, a self-confessed never-do-well, agreed, but the trip could be funded only by the advances they would receive for the writing of the book.

The two made a couple as odd as can be: Tsung was a dedicated, disciplined, yet carefree Ch'an master; meditations, on the other hand, were a nauseating put-off for Crane. In the eight years or so knowing each other had not made them so close and understanding of each other as did their perilous and seemingly miraculous adventures in north China. This culminates in an 18-hour-long tortuous, treacherous climb up and down a mountain that nearly kills the old monk. It was the love of poetry that had brought them together, it is poetry that pulls them through on their adventure here. All this is recounted by Crane in words that are more poetic than prosaic.

Gory accounts of atrocities are missing, and so are those of any mysticism. Crane's narrative transcends Tsung's spiritual outlook and his own worldly outlook. In other words, this one is not like the archetypal books about China. The trappings may look familiar: a young disciple flees an exotic land with his master's spiritual secrets to escape from marauding persecutors, a devout monk, a die-hard sceptic and their thrilling adventures... Yet, this is no Hollywood blockbuster script. This is a true story. With truth being stranger than fiction, there is no reason why one should not see a cinematic version of Crane's narrative either. But if only poetry can be rewritten on celluloid.

Global Civil Society, the result of years of study by 150 researchers through the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, is a comprehensive country-by-country analysis of the scope, size, composition, and economic dimensions of the nonprofit sector in 22 countries spread over six regions. The systematically comparative and methodologically rigorous overview report should interest nonprofit and foundation leaders, public policymakers, educators, and others interested in nonprofit activity around the world.

The book says, "...a veritable 'global associational revolution' appears to be under way, a massive upsurge of organized private, voluntary activity in literally every corner of the world. Prompted in part by growing doubts about the capability of the state to cope on its own with the social welfare, developmental, and environmental problems that face nations today, this growth of civil society organizations has been stimulated as well by the communications revolution..."

The nonprofit sector is a far more significant economic force the world over than is perceived to be. Substantial differences exist in both the overall size and the composition of this sector in different countries; private philanthropy plays a far less significant role in the financing of this sector than either fees or public sector support; and the sector has grown substantially in recent years in most of the countries for which trend data are available.

Many facts brought to light by this report will raise eyebrows. The nonprofit sector, even keeping aside religious congregations, is a $1.1 trillion industry that employs close to 19 million full-time equivalent paid workers. Nonprofit expenditures in the 22 countries surveyed alone average 4.6 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP), and nonprofit employment is nearly 5 per cent of all nonagricultural employment. "

If the nonprofit sector in these countries were a separate national economy, it would be the eighth largest economy in the world, ahead of Brazil, Russia, Canada, and Spain. The nonprofit employment in the eight countries for which time-series data were available grew by an average of 24 per cent, or more than 4 per cent a year, between 1990 and 1995. By comparison, overall employment in these same countries grew during this same period by a considerably slower 8 per cent, or less than 2 per cent a year.

"The relative size of the nonprofit sector varies greatly among countries, from a high of 12.6 per cent of total nonagricultural employment in the Netherlands to a low of less than 1 per cent of total employment in Mexico. The overall 22-country average, however, was close to 5 per cent. This means that the U.S., at 7.8 per cent without religious worship, lies substantially above the global average. However, it falls below three Western European countries the Netherlands (12.6 per cent), Ireland (11.5 per cent), and Belgium (10.5 per cent), as well as Israel (9.2 per cent)."

Annual salaries of many nonprofit officials far exceed the $1 million mark. The growth of the nonprofit sector owes less to private philanthropy or public-sector support, and more to a substantial increase in fee income. There is another angle to it too. Financing nonprofit organisations have had less and less to do with philanthropic giving and more and more to do with fees paid for services by governments. The Catholic Charities of America, for instance, receives some 62 per cent of its annual $1.9 billion operating income from eight national agencies as well as local and state governments, to provide home care for the elderly, battered-women's shelters, foster care, and other essential services. All this is only the top of the proverbial iceberg: all data relates to 1995.