A readable, provocative study of globalism and anti-globalism in conflict.
A fly-on-the-wall history of a fateful gathering of capitalist trade ministers in 1999.
What is the World Trade Organization? By some lights, it’s a group that makes sure that international business plays by the rules. By others, it’s a means by which the major capitalist powers keep the developing world on a string. As Gibson, author of 14 Miles and The Edge Becomes the Center, recounts, representatives from a host of nations came to Seattle seeking to lock down an agenda that would make the “Quad”—the European Union, the U.S., Japan, and Canada—de facto rulers of the global economy. Thousands came to protest. Says one leading anti–WTO organizer of those street actions, “For people within the U.S. to break from the idea that Americans support their government’s corporate globalization policies was a big shift in how the world saw things.” The police had a different view, but some were less inclined to bust skulls and haul protestors off to jail than others. Similarly, Gibson reveals, some protestors were looking for an excuse to break things, while most, as one government worker related, “were the model kids—if you had a teenager, how you would want them to be.” A labor council leader was even more conciliatory: “This is what democracy looks like. Sometimes it’s ugly. And sometimes it’s not. We all have a responsibility and role to play, one way or the other.” Interestingly, Gibson records, several organizers from the day lament that, today, social media keeps people from banding together in person, even as governments learned a lesson and now maintain deep cordons between WTO meetings and any possible discontents—who, notes one contributor, now run the risk of being “viewed as a Trumpist in some way” for opposing so-called free trade.
A readable, provocative study of globalism and anti-globalism in conflict.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781668033562
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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