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GLOBAL WOMAN

Name: GLOBAL WOMAN
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
ISBN: 0-8050-6995-X

NANNIES, MAIDS, AND SEX WORKERS IN THE NEW ECONOMY

edited by Barbara Ehrenreich & Arlie Russell Hochschild ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 6, 2003

For women’s study courses, this look at a heretofore largely unexplored phenomenon is sure to provide controversial material.

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Fifteen instructive essays on the causes and effects of female workers’ migration from poor nations to affluent ones.

In their introduction, social commentator Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed, 2001, etc.) and sociologist Hochschild (The Time Bind, 1997) voice the hope that this compilation, to which each has contributed an article, will make visible the female underside of globalization. Third World women leave home by the millions to provide traditionally female services in other countries. There are four major migrational flows: from southeast Asia to the Middle and Far East, from Africa to Europe, from East to West in Europe, and from South to North in the Americas. Most of the essays here are by professors of sociology or anthropology at American universities; the text is rife with such phrases as “intergenerational power dynamics,” “gender roles,” and “spatial dispersal of economic activities.” An exception is novelist Susan Cheever’s piece, which examines on her personal experiences as an employer of nannies. The weightier essays are based on fieldwork, including extensive interviews with migrant domestic workers, and they tackle such issues as the pressures global capitalism puts on women and their families, the ways in which the migration of married women has altered relationships with the husbands and children left behind, and the unbalanced relationships that develop between these workers and their female employers. The most disturbing piece looks at the sex trade in Thailand, where young girls are sold into prostitution and exported to brothels in Japan, Europe, and America. Somewhat out of place here, one essay explores the special case of Vietnam, where a surplus of women has resulted in an exodus of highly educated women who enter arranged marriages with low-wage-earning Vietnamese men living overseas. An annotated list of activist organizations is appended.

For women’s study courses, this look at a heretofore largely unexplored phenomenon is sure to provide controversial material.

Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2003

ISBN: 0-8050-6995-X

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | WOMEN & FEMINISM | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

- BOOK REVIEW
HAD I KNOWN
by Barbara Ehrenreich

- BOOK REVIEW
NATURAL CAUSES
by Barbara Ehrenreich

- BOOK REVIEW
LIVING WITH A WILD GOD
by Barbara Ehrenreich

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WEDGE

THE SECRET WAR BETWEEN THE FBI AND CIA

by Mark Riebling ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 21, 1994

A history of American spy versus American cop written in a manner as informative as any treatise and as entertaining as the...

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A brilliant first book chronicling the bitter rivalry of the FBI and CIA from WW II, when the CIA had its roots in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), through the present.

Riebling, who has been an associate editor at Random House, combines outstanding research based on newly declassified documents with extensive interviews to provide an anecdotal and extremely well written account of the strife between the Agency and the Bureau. He offers a superlative presentation of the dramatis personae: FDR, Harry Truman, OSS Chief William "Wild Bill'' Donovan, J. Edgar Hoover, Allen Dulles, superspy James Jesus Angleton, and assorted supporting characters, including the present-day CIA embarrassment, Aldrich Ames. When the OSS and, later, the CIA were formed, FBI chief Hoover, the consummate bureaucratic turf warrior, was hardly a booster. He often refused to cooperate with the OSS, and the latter agency held the FBI in as much contempt. The competition between the two groups during the war was exacerbated by an old American social conflict: The OSS was comprised largely of Ivy League WASPs, while the FBI was dominated by less privileged Irish Catholics. One of the finest chapters of the book discusses how the FBI and CIA tried to protect their respective flanks in the wake of the Kennedy assassination—since the agencies had failed to share information about Lee Harvey Oswald. Riebling also details Angleton's obsessive search for a mole in the CIA and how that operation brought about more conflict with the FBI. In an epilogue, Riebling addresses various methods that the government might use to bring about a resolution of the FBI-CIA "problem.'' But he concludes that, in a republican government, the current discord might be preferable to a "superagency'' combining the purview of the two organizations.

A history of American spy versus American cop written in a manner as informative as any treatise and as entertaining as the best espionage novels.

Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1994

ISBN: 0-679-41471-1

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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ALL THE TROUBLE IN THE WORLD

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF OVERPOPULATION, FAMINE, ECOLOGICAL DISASTER, ETHNIC HATRED, PLAGUE, AND POVERTY

by P.J. O’Rourke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 12, 1994

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Rolling Stone's token Republican and the H.L. Mencken Fellow of the libertarian Cato Institute, O'Rourke (Give War a Chance, 1992, etc.) has written his most sustained and well-argued book yet. O'Rourke touts the glories of free minds and free markets as we currently enjoy them in the US, despite, in his view, the current administration's effort to undermine both. He systematically looks at the issues that supposedly dog our times, combining a glance at the scholarly literature (goofing on academic prose) with fieldwork (getting sauced on five continents). There's lots of typical O'Rourke yuks: the near-libelous name-calling; the international search for good booze and pretty women; and the admitted attacks of ``troglodyte dyspepsia.'' While earnest college kids hug trees and whine about being victims, the rest of the world, in O'Rourke's eye, is determined to get rich. In Bangladesh, he considers the nature of population growth; in Somalia, the course of famine; in the Amazon, the fate of the environment; in the former Yugoslavia, the consequences of multiculturalism; and the roots of poverty in Vietnam. What's behind it all? Politics, says O'Rourke. Often the left-wing sort. In O'Rourke's jaundiced view, the ``moral buttinskis'' of the world continually demonstrate their contempt for the most obvious solution: unfettered capitalism. And he details the wonders of Third World markets by visiting the bustling bazaars of Saigon. What better way to study foreign entrepreneurship than searching for the best bars and restaurants? Only the Somalis, with their intense hatred, really get him down, as do a number of mush-brained environmentalists he schmoozes with at the Earth Summit in Rio. The perfect antidote to revolutionary tourism, O'Rourke's raucous narrative suffers from one conceptual flaw: Like many right-wingers, he forgets that regulation, reform, and butting in led to so many of our current freedoms. (First printing of 150,000; $150,000 ad/promo; author tour)