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FALLING OFF THE EDGE

TRAVELS THROUGH THE DARK HEART OF GLOBALIZATION

A critical look at the myths and national delusions surrounding globalization.

Globalization sounds good in theory but proves disastrous in practice, Time Africa bureau chief Perry demonstrates.

Covering hot spots from South Asia to South Africa, the author reports some alarming developments since 9/11. Globalization—that is, a cost-directed consolidation of capital, labor and markets that Perry characterizes as “global governance without global government”—tends to enrich the few and impoverish the many, accelerating a worldwide sense of injustice and resentment. Despite buoyant growth in such developing nations as China and India, real income of the poorest ten percent is falling, exacerbated by the fact that population growth often outstrips economic growth. The explosion of crime, worsening of pollution, growing AIDS populations, spread of Islamic fundamentalism and war all have roots in the globalization frenzy, the author systematically reveals. In China, for example, the city of Shenzhen seems to be booming, exhibiting “the same energy, the same-get ahead ethos and the same towering respect for a buck” as nearby Hong Kong. But it’s “an unregulated free-for-all…Tijuana, with Chinese characteristics,” writes Perry. Sweatshops operate with impunity, and there’s a brisk trade in illegal wares of every sort, including endangered species served as restaurant food. In India, “offshoring” (moving labor West to East) is not proving to be the country’s panacea; there is no middle class, infrastructure or education to speak of, and while a handful get richer, 900 million Indians still earn $2 per day or less. The author traces the origins of several key wars, such as those in Nigeria and Darfur, in terms of spreading global misery, some of it due to climate change directly linked to Western pollution. Maoists in Nepal, Naxals in India and Tamils in Sri Lanka—not to mention al-Qaeda—all target the instruments of modern-day globalization. Perry, to his great credit, is on the beat, scratching under surfaces and helping to clear away the obfuscation around this important issue.

A critical look at the myths and national delusions surrounding globalization.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-59691-526-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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