November 7, 2012: From UN headquarters in New York, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon commented for the first time on the new book ‘Conversations with Ban Ki-moon: The View from the Top’: “I don’t agree with all of ‘Conversations with Ban Kim-moon’, but that is to be expected. But on the whole, he got my point of view across well. And I would add this: I think Tom Plate tried hard to understand my point of view about many issues, especially about the future of the United Nations, the need for global citizenship and the importance of understanding the UN’s inherent limitations as well as the UN’s overwhelming and vital relevance today. Certainly, the author and I do agree on one very important issue. We agree that the UN, for all its obvious faults, is more important than ever. We need to understand that the world would be worse off without it. We all need to work harder to make the UN work better.” This was the top UN official’s first public comment on the new book just published by Marshall Cavendish International (Asia). It is based on a series of revealing conversations between the former foreign minister of South Korea, now into his second term at the UN, and American journalist and professor Tom Plate, the founder of Asia Media.
