An urgent eyewitness account of how culture and land are being destroyed by “a remorseless process of commodification.”
Sharp portraits of the predatory resource extraction practices that continue to plague Latin America.
In trying to combat poverty and inequity, Latin America has returned to unsustainable systems of extracting precious resources, as Robinson clearly demonstrates in this deeply troubling exposé. The author often refers back to Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America (1971), which chronicled the continent’s dictator-driven history of plunder of natural resources for the economic benefit of the oligarchy. Despite the so-called “pink tide” in the early years of the 20th century—a trend that included such progressive leaders as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Evo Morales in Bolivia—the urgent need to raise economic growth rates as a means to combat poverty and generate development has allowed the ruinous old model to return. In a work of excellent on-the-ground reportage, Robinson delineates how the demand for natural resources, “from soy to niobium, beef to gold, and oil to avocado,” is creating dangerous extraction cycles. Readers see the devastation firsthand as the author leads us to obscure, hard-to-reach mines and farming backwaters in countries from Brazil to Ecuador, Venezuela to Chile. Soy harvested from the ill Amazon rainforest supplies industrial chicken plants in Europe with some of the raw material to turn out billions of Chicken McNuggets. The potato, essential to the pre-Columbian civilizations in the Andean highlands, has been converted into the addictive, ubiquitous potato chip. In the Mexican region of Michoacán, the avocado has fallen victim to a monoculture run by organized crime. Even if the destructive mining of oil decreases in coming years, the increased use of battery-powered technology will require further extraction of rare minerals like copper, cobalt, silver, and lithium. Despite mass protests over the past few years in Colombia, Chile, and Ecuador, Robinson is not optimistic about the future, but she lays out the situation in stark, penetrating detail.
An urgent eyewitness account of how culture and land are being destroyed by “a remorseless process of commodification.”Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61219-935-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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