Overview

Concerned about climate change, over-population, the future for our children - and wondering whether politicians will ditch confrontation for needed cooperation? This book looks into these challenges, religious violence, and other problems of our times. It's an essay in a new genre - the world-view (weltanschauung) genre - telling frankly what the writer has come to believe about this world and what may lie beyond. John Pedler, now 85, a former British diplomat has spent a lifetime in diplomacy. He's an economist by training and a student of comparative religion. He's also been a war correspondent in Vietnam, a businessman in China during the Cultural Revolution, and the first Director of the Cambodia Trust for land mine victims. He worked for the Bosnian Government during the siege of Sarajevo. Recently he's been advocating a settlement for the Ukraine crisis and ways to counter extremist Islam. Here he gives, with no axe to grind, his inevitably controversial conclusions about how, since Word War II, our world has come to be so riven with political and religious strife although overshadowed by these existential challenges. He details the U turns he believes are required - if the politicians awake in time! (His four previous books are spy stories). This won't date quickly: it spotlights the future for years to come. However forceful your reactions, you'll find this book will have you reflecting on your own weltanschauung! John Pedler lives with his wife in France where he is now working. His children - whose questions over time inspired these answers - all live in London.

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9781500439682

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John Pedler, born in 1928, was educated at the Browne and Nicholls School in Cambridge Mass. USA and at the London School of Economics where he took a subsidiary course in Comparative Religion. He was a cadet pilot in the RAFVR and worked in intelligence in Trieste during the British occupation. He joined the British Foreign Service (now the Diplomatic Service) in 1951. Following brief postings to Austria and Singapore he spent 4 years in in the new British Embassies in Laos and Cambodia after the French withdrawal from Indochina. After a further period in the Foreign Office he was posted to the British Embassy in Paris. During a year's leave of absence he reported for the Sunday Telegraph on China and as a war correspondent in Vietnam during the American war. He later ran a family business with China during Mao's Cultural Revolution, later becoming a co-founder and first Director of the Cambodia Trust, contributing to the Financial Times. He worked for the Bosnian government in besieged Sarajevo. He became a diplomatic consultant, based at first in Croatia and now in France where he and his wife live. He has three children and four grandchildren all of whom live in London.

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