Despite Nawa’s forceful optimism, the author delivers a troubling indictment of the drug and anti-terror wars visited upon...
This fusion of memoir and international reportage paints a disturbing picture of present-day Afghanistan as a tribal narco-state.
Journalist Nawa fled the country with her family as a young girl during the Soviet invasion, and only returned in 2000 as an American citizen working for a Pakistani think tank as an editor and journalist. She then spent several years traveling through the country and reporting on its transformations. Nawa is especially curious about the effects of increased opiate production on Afghan women, and her conclusions are grim: “...the Afghan drug trade provided funding for terrorists and for the Taliban... and [was] strengthening corrupt Afghan government officials whom the United States supported.” The author portrays a disordered, cruel society in which a proud culture of intricate traditions has been repeatedly battered by historical conflicts—most recently, the disastrous American response to the Taliban and the explosion of narcotics culture. Afghan social structures seem built around the subjugation of women, and shady drug lords routinely demand marriage to debtors’ female children as payment for opium debts, a circumstance equated with virtual slavery. Nawa met one such girl, a spirited and angry 12-year-old named Darya. The author traveled throughout the country in an attempt to understand the surreal circumstances contributing to Darya’s plight, talking to rural farmers, anti-narcotics agents and dealers. Essentially, despite brutal risks, the rural poor are drawn to the opium industry due to tribal pressures and for want of better options. Nawa ably captures the tragic complexity of Afghan society and the sheer difficulty of life there. Although the dialogue sometimes feels reconstructed or artificial, her assured narrative clearly stems from in-depth reporting in a risk-laden environment.
Despite Nawa’s forceful optimism, the author delivers a troubling indictment of the drug and anti-terror wars visited upon Afghanistan, and of certain reactionary aspects of Afghan culture.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-193470-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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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