Anecdotal inside info on the dirty deeds of the military-industrial complex, replete with sermons on resisting and changing...
Perkins follows up the bestselling Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004) with a still repentant but now broader view of the unconscionable plundering of the planet and endangerment of its future by the “corporatocracy.”
That is, powerful, usually American-based corporations in concert with politicians. These unchecked organizations, avers the author, tend to work through the U.S.-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which extend credit to needy nations. There, graft is siphoned off by co-opted local officials, and benefits accrue to corporate contractors of massive projects while downtrodden economies in the long run acquire only debt. Perkins takes on every variation of the corruption model, from keeping labor costs down among sweatshop producers of consumer goods craved by U.S. consumers to maintaining affordable petroleum for the nation that swills a disproportionate portion of the world’s supply and generates commensurate climate-threatening pollution. Unfortunately, current events put the author’s case in sharper focus than he does. Headlines fresh from the Iraq misadventure, for example, affirm the notion that America doesn’t need to win its wars in order for fat-cat companies with no-bid contracts to reap huge profits from them. And the CIA that Perkins pictures once sending “jackal” minions to eliminate South American heads of state at the flick of a conspiratorial finger seems almost preferable to the one that was unable to get a clue on Saddam’s WMD situation. Perkins may indeed be “wracked with guilt” (as he chooses perhaps too often to remind readers), but so much undocumented, rehashed innuendo from someone acknowledging a former career in distorting facts does not make for compelling penitence.
Anecdotal inside info on the dirty deeds of the military-industrial complex, replete with sermons on resisting and changing it.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-525-95015-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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