WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS

Harvard professor of history and economics David S. Landes offers a sweeping look at the complex interplay between wealth and cultures -- across the centuries and around the world. Now in paperback, this bestseller explores historical puzzles such as how China, so far ahead of the West for millennia, lost out to Western industrialism and why geographically strategic and lush regions like Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa still lag behind more developed nations. It's a broad, complex, and important work.