An in-depth and compelling disclosure of the changes needed to protect the world's travel sites while maintaining a good...
"In 2012 the world passed the 1 billion mark for international trips," writes former New York Times correspondent Becker (America’s Vietnam War, 1992, etc.), who provides an extensive exposé on the benefits and detriments of tourism.
Travel is the largest global industry in the world, with poor countries ranking the business just behind oil and energy development as the means to end poverty. Magazines and newspapers are filled with glamorous photos and comprehensive reports of the best beaches, hotels and restaurants in the world, but until now, there have been few significant reports about the effects on these sites. Becker holds nothing back as she describes the destruction and pollution created by the hordes that crowd the ancient cities, seashores and national parks of the world. The desire to see, touch and experience foreign cultures has brought jobs to millions and revenues that support many countries, but it has also caused water shortages, the destruction of shorelines, billions of pounds of garbage and raw sewage, and an increase in sex trafficking worldwide. Hotels and restaurants bring needed jobs to poverty-stricken regions, but the hours are long and the wages low; many workers, like those toiling in the construction industry in Dubai, are forced to live in labor camps, crammed a dozen or more to a room. Cruise ships offer every amenity and an excess of shopping opportunities while dumping sewage and oily bilge water and spewing forth toxic levels of exhaust. In the tourism industry, image is definitely everything, but Becker shows readers the flip side of all this luxury and play, exposing the seedy underbelly of a business gone haywire from Cambodia to the United States.
An in-depth and compelling disclosure of the changes needed to protect the world's travel sites while maintaining a good profit margin.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1439160992
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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