An entertaining narrative, roguishly told, and also a pungent explanation of prohibition’s inevitable failure.
Provocative, troubling treatise on how large-scale cocaine smuggling has tainted all aspects of the global economy.
The incendiary title is somewhat hyperbolic. While the book contains many tips regarding the mechanics of trafficking, the first-person narrative conceals a more scholarly framework. La Repubblica journalist Rastello directs the Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, a think tank devoted to the economics of criminality. The author explains that his book represents “an attempt (a hazardous one, in all honesty) to allow [traffickers] to hold the floor, without censoring them.” Thus, Rastello writes from behind a composite persona of an (understandably) anonymous veteran smuggler, an Italian who’s reaped both great wealth and a 22-year-prison sentence from his misdeeds. The narrator organizes the book’s five chapters into “lessons” based on hard-won understandings gained as a sistemista, a logistics and transport specialist relied on by South-American cartels. The first chapter, “The Problem,” provides historical context. During the 1980s, the cartels simply bribed everyone in sight, but the loyalty of corrupt officials was inevitably suspect, especially as competitive bloodshed increased. Simultaneously, an enormous new market for cocaine was developing in Europe, fueled by ruthless nationalists in league with criminals. Although cocaine producers continued using mules and other small-scale smuggling methods, they also began developing what the narrator refers to as “delivery in the dark,” compartmentalizing operations so that the smuggling task became the sole responsibility of the sistemistas, “the managers of big shipments, the guys who shift immense riches, flood continents, change the planet’s destiny, and then go and drink a glass of pisco or rum.” The narrator asserts that his smuggling innovations “guarantee the safety of the merchandise and of the employees.” Essentially, he conceals substantial loads within bulky products like tiles or granite, disguising the process by mimicking legitimate shipments to well-regarded corporations, and receiving eight-figure profits following a six-figure investment.
An entertaining narrative, roguishly told, and also a pungent explanation of prohibition’s inevitable failure.Pub Date: March 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-86547-949-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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