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dobbydoo22's review against another edition
2.0
There is a lot of interesting information and insight in this book, but the organization is pretty terrible, and sometimes the narrative devolves into pages of just statistics estimates. All of that information has its place, but perhaps the author's background as a newspaper journalist made it challenging for him to weave a book-length narrative together in a way that flows better? Like I said, interesting thesis and insights, but it can be a slog at times.
unisonlibrarian's review against another edition
2.0
This was probably the strangest book on anti-capitalism I’ve read. The author is a foreign correspondent for Time magazine and has been to many war zones and poverty stricken areas around the world. As a result what we have is a loosely connected series of stories focusing primarily on human interest elements from a writer who has clearly spent most of his life believing in globalisation until the job he took on forced him to see the other side of the coin. There are some good points made and some moving stories of individuals within the areas mentioned from Sri Lanka to South Africa and India to Shenzen in China. The writer gets to his most moving language when talking about global media representation of poverty and war, an area I think he would be wise to move in to. The problems with this book are that it is from the point of view of someone who gives us the list of problems with no cogent solutions, or even suggestions of solutions outside of his quite amazing conclusion that War is Good. He claims to have “fallen in love with war” during his recent reporting of US incursions in to Iraq and Afghanistan and believes that progress and war have a mutually exclusive relationship. Aside from this he also suggests the current capitalist system is bankrupt and then tells us the left have no answers either, whether communist Maoists, or basic humanitarians. It is a book filled with an overwhelming sense of confusion, which is increasingly about the author and his experiences as opposed to the tragic people involved. The information is there, the author seems to have been able to amass the facts without putting them together in the correct order. As a result he aims to provide a window to more egalitarian future and succeeds only in presenting one of perpetual war, misery and “progress” through the two former ingredients. It’s like telling us to make a chocolate cake by mixing wood and a fountain pen. A huge disappointment from someone who is read widely by the American market and could have presented a much less personal account of inequality with a much greater impact.
tkadlec's review against another edition
4.0
Perry walks you through a bunch of first-hand accounts of his experiences in areas where the impacts of globalization has been anything but encouraging. It's not incredibly in depth, and a few of the stories seem a little more loosely tied to globalization than others, but altogether an interesting look at the "other" side of globalization.
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