Clear, expert reporting on a region of which many Americans may be unaware.
Veteran journalist Eichstaedt (First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, 2009, etc.) explores the murky waters of Somali piracy.
In the seas around the Horn of Africa, which form the coast of troubled and fractured Somalia, pirates attack ships on a near-daily basis, and often successfully hold craft and crew for expensive ransoms. Who are these pirates and what are their motivations? Eichstaedt traveled to East Africa in search of answers, and what he discovered depended on who he talked to. The simplest answer may be that “[i]n a deeply divided, impoverished, and lawless land, the lure of piracy was virtually irresistible.” Decades of civil war robbed young male Somalis of hope and work. Under such circumstances, attacking a giant tanker in a small skiff made sense, and some suggested that piracy had evolved “into a sophisticated and well-organized industry.” Piracy on this scale, writes the author, must have clandestine backers, funding from other African and Islamist states that travels in and out of Somalia through the secretive global hawala system of money transfers. Most ominous may be the ties between pirate groups and the radical Islamist militia, al-Shabaab, which now controls southern Somalia. Ransom money may be used to purchase weapons for the group, and pirates may be engaged in gun-running for them. If so, writes Eichstaedt, the stakes are higher, as al-Shabaab becomes both a regional danger—especially to neighboring Kenya, which houses a refugee camp with 300,000 Somalis—and a global threat. The author admits that much remains unclear, but he returns often to the theme of piracy as an outcome of poverty and lawlessness. These conditions are not inevitable, and he concludes with precise recommendations for how the international community might end piracy and rebuild Somalia.
Clear, expert reporting on a region of which many Americans may be unaware.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56976-311-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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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