Important documentation of how mechanisms favored by the 1 percent increase global inequalities.
Sharply observed descent into the labyrinth of finance and semantics with which nations and the superrich secure their wealth.
Abrahamian unravels the opaque world of “special economic zones” and other places she terms “legal fictions,” where national and economic boundaries are blurred. She examines “how consultants, lawyers, financiers, and other mercenaries have carved out physical and virtual space above, below, and between nations.” Her research entailed travel to places that “are a product of colonialism, capitalism, technology, megalomania, and a pinch of alchemy,” including remote regions of Laos (economically co-opted by China) and an “open” Norwegian settlement near the North Pole. Other areas she investigates are the wide use in shipping of deceptive flags of convenience and likely future struggles over asteroid mining and ownership of space. Her focus begins appropriately with Geneva, where she grew up, termed a “City of Holes” for its legendary discretion, “a kind of black hole straddling globalization and regulation," forever marked by the “steep moral cost” of its financial complicity with the Nazis during World War II. She describes the Geneva Freeport warehouse as an example of actual physical spaces not fully subject to state controls, “essentially a legal hack” with a clear role in hiding artworks for the rich to evade taxes. Other chapters examine how Western financial interests promoted “free-trade zones” in remote nations like Mauritius, noting, “This made it profitable for American firms to seek out manufacturing opportunities abroad rather than making products in the U.S., where labor cost more.” Abrahamian also considers trendy concepts like “charter cities,” noting, “To cede this territory to rigidly ideological capitalists alone would be a big mistake.” Her well-researched, engrossing work manages the minutiae of several fields, including telecommunications, maritime law, and fine art, to stitch together a multilayered tale of how privilege works to protect itself.
Important documentation of how mechanisms favored by the 1 percent increase global inequalities.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780593329856
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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