The tale of Aramco—a joint venture owned by Standard Oil of California, Exxon, Texaco, and Mobil in profitable symbiosis with Saudi potentates—and its eventual life as an Arabian entity is one to rival many an adventure novel. Brown (Treason in the Blood: H. St. John Philby, Kim Philby, and the Spy Case of the Century, 1994) has produced a text populated with Islamic fundamentalists and their blue-eyed infidel friends who developed and exploited, from beneath the desert sands, the world’s greatest hydrocarbon reserves. Aramco, an integral piece of the Middle East jigsaw puzzle for two generations, was a colossal consortium continuously siphoning fabulous cash flows from what Brown calls “the Empty Quarter of Araby.” Aramco existed at the whim of Ibn Saud and the kings who followed him. Sometimes the relationship was difficult, but during WWII oil still flowed. And during the Cold War, Aramco was excused from federal investigation of profiteering. Extra profits also came at the expense of the firm’s hosts; oil was sold, for example, to Aramco’s affiliates to keep royalties down. Naturally, the firm regularly attempted to influence the American government to reduce support for Israel. When it came to pitting fixed public policy against petrodollars, who would blame Aramco for choosing the latter? The author doesn’t (though he notes the general failure to “persuade the Washington polity that U.S. Middle East policy endangered the Aramco concession”). Aramco, with its American owners, finally “became the instrument of a foreign power, Saudi Arabia,” Brown concedes. His business narrative is marked by tales of bribery, deceit, and intrigue. Withal, life as an “Aramcon,” as a Westerner in the corporate desert village, was privileged while it lasted. Finally, the Saudis took control and the idyll was over. After producing “a trillion or two” Aramco was “now at one with Nineveh and Tyre.” Here’s Big Oil geopolitics paired with high drama, adventure, and bloodshed, with kidnapping, murder, and Holy War. An interesting story, indeed.
Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-59220-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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