Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles

[A] country-by-country tour de force of what makes emerging markets tick. He is an excellent writer with a keen eye for detail and a lyrical prose sense...As with Michael Lewis' Boomerang on the European crisis, for sheer readability and insight on the various parts of the ongoing emerging drama, I daresay you won't find a better choice.

A primer to guide us...This is a great road map to the new and better-balanced world in which we will all live and an encouraging one.

In Breakout Nations, he takes us on a fascinating gallop through the countries at the edges of the developed world. Not only does he challenge the accepted wisdom-that China and India will motor on, ad infinitum-but he comes up with some surprising candidates for the next decade's economic stars.

It's refreshing to read Breakout Nations, Ruchir Sharma's book on the Bric countries-Brazil, Russia, India, China-and the rest of the developing world...His book offers a careful view that has little truck with forecasts of the relentless Bric-led rise of the emerging world.

There is no better book for country-by-country accounts of emerging markets (and riskier ones called frontier markets). Its strong point is the author's reliance on grassroots experience in each country, avoiding statistical charts.

At the core of this impressive book is the counterintuitive argument that the boom of the mid-2000s was a blip in the long historical trend for emerging economies and that the next decade may be one of decelerating. In Sharma's view, the much-hyped decline of the West and emergence of the rest may take a lot longer than optimists would like to believe.

This is among the best books to understand the emerging world and its positive and negative aspects. Sharma matches the brilliance of Thomas L Friedman, author of the widely cited The World Is Flat.

This week's Book of the Week is Breakout Nations by Ruchir Sharma, one of the world's leading emerging-market investors. This is the best book on global economic trends I've read in a while.

Breakout Nations is basically an investor's lonely planet guide to the world for the new century.

It is really the focus of economic attention around the world. It is a whole new look at which economies are going to be winners and which are going to be losers.