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WORLD ON FIRE

HOW EXPORTING FREE MARKET DEMOCRACY BREEDS ETHNIC HATRED AND GLOBAL INSTABILITY

An antidote to the typical one-market tidings, and bad news for those contemplating investments abroad.

A nuanced contribution to the debate over whether free markets spread democracy or merely advance the McDonaldsization of the globe.

The answer, writes Chua (Law/Yale Univ.), is that they do both—and then some, depending on local conditions. But more often than not, Chua holds, the imposition of so-called “free markets” in the so-called “developing world” means that a ruling elite, often ethnically distinct from the mass of the ruled, prospers far out of proportion to its number. By way of illustration, Chua offers, imagine that Chinese-Americans, representing about two percent of the US population, controlled the country’s largest banks and most of its productive real estate, while the 75 percent of the population considered “white” owned no land and, worse, “had experienced no upward mobility as far back as anyone can remember”: transfer the scenario abroad, “and you will have approximated the core social dynamic that characterizes much of the non-Western world.” Market forces that bring still more wealth into the hands of the minority—Chinese, in the case of Indonesia, or Lebanese in the case of Sierra Leone—necessarily breed dissent and ethnic hatred. Political liberalization may do nothing to ease the tensions, Chua adds. Democratization in the Middle East, for instance, would likely mean only the rise of nationalist and fundamentalist regimes; corrupt and autocratic though they may be, the region’s kings are still more liberal than those who would replace them should the majority rule. All this is very provocative, to be sure, but Chua defends her case well (and adds a damning footnote to the history of Enron along the way). Globalism is a fact of modern life, she concludes, but one destined to yield much bloodshed in the years to come—unless, she adds, the privileged minorities do the smart thing: spread the wealth while they still can.

An antidote to the typical one-market tidings, and bad news for those contemplating investments abroad.

Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2002

ISBN: 0-385-50302-4

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002

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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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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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