For many years, he was a Senior Writer for The New York Times, where he spent most of a 22-year career as a foreign correspondent, working in and traveling to over 100 countries on five continents. From August 2003 to July 2008, he was the chief of the newspaper’s Shanghai bureau. Prior to this assignment, he headed bureaus in Japan, West and Central Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. French is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (Knopf 2004), which was named non-fiction book of the year by several newspapers. Continent won the 2005 American Library Association Black Caucus Award for Non-Fiction, and was a finalist for both the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage and for the Hurston-Wright Foundation’s non-fiction prize. Posted by zzhu at October 30, 2008 11:31 AM