Glazer, Nathan. "Beyond the Melting Pot." Review of Ethics in a World of Strangers by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny by Amartya Sen, Education Next, Fall 2006.

Excerpt: The books reviewed here are the first to be published in a series titled “Issues of Our Times,” edited by the omnipresent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose picture, with a brief statement, prefaces each. The volumes are by two prominent intellectuals who stand at the height of academic life in the West, and who, because of their origins in Africa and India, are thought of as spokesmen, in some of their work, for the third world, a role they accept. They were both educated at Cambridge University in England and hold major appointments in leading American universities.

Kwame Appiah, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, formerly at Harvard, has written books in technical philosophy and on current issues of race and multiculturalism. Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, is university professor at Harvard, formerly master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and also a philosopher, with a prodigious and influential bibliography on technical issues in economics, welfare economics, economic development, social philosophy, the role of the non-Western world in world civilization, and the importance of Indian thought and science, among other topics.

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