Lin Yutang (1895-1976) was a renowned Chinese intellectual, philosopher, teacher, author and inventor (he invented a Chinese typewriter and lesser things like a toothbrush which dispensed toothpaste). This book published in the middle of the Second World War became quite controversial because it broke with the tone of his earlier English writings by criticizing Western racism and imperialism. As he said in the 'Preface to Myself': "The purpose of this book is to say something that must be said and say it with simplicity... the shadow of another war already looms before us. We have to think straight and think fast."

Now sorrowful, now joking, but always in deadly earnest, the Chinese author Lin Yutang as philosopher faces the grim facts of war and the grimmer prospects of peace. Dismayed by the materialism of the West, he offers not a blueprint for the postwar world, but an approach to thinking about it that is new to us but not new at all in the Orient, wise in the ways of mankind.