Significant work.
Barber, the prophetic author of Jihad vs. McWorld (1995), delivers a frightening analysis of the way consumerism is vitiating shoppers in the United States and around the world.
Once upon a time, Americans were obsessed with being productive; now, we’re obsessed with consuming. The consumerism that has infected society, Barber charges, both fosters and requires an “enduring childishness.” Corporations vie for ever younger consumers, and marketers understand that in order to keep people buying things they don’t need, potential consumers must be kept in a state of childishness that emphasizes play, impulse and entitlement over work, deliberation and responsibility. Some of Barber’s analysis feels a little banal—as when he points out that people buy goods hawked by celebrities because purchasers believe that Michael Jordan–endorsed shoes will make them like Jordan. But most of his thinking is fresh. One of the problems of consumerism, to which Barber devotes an entire chapter, is that it homogenizes an otherwise diverse population. He speaks of a kind of “market totalism,” if not totalitarianism, in which the consumer market is addictive, ubiquitous, omnipresent, self-replicating and self-justifying. But this is not an anti-capitalist screed. Rather, much of it is a history lesson. The culture of capitalism, Barber explains, has changed. In an earlier century, capitalism met the “real needs of real people,” and it fostered both freedom and citizenship. Today, capitalism meets only the needs of corporations looking to make a buck. Yet capitalism need not lead to unchecked consumerism. It can be made to promote equality, and not just profit. Barber concludes with a call to temper capitalism and renew a sense of civic belonging—not just nationally, but globally. Perhaps his next book will explain how we might heed that urgent calling.
Significant work.Pub Date: March 19, 2007
ISBN: 0-393-04961-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
A random walk through the entrepreneurial outskirts of postindustrial commerce and show biz with a tour guide whose spiel has a nasty edge to it. Drawing on stories he has reported as a CBS TV correspondent, Geist (Little League Confidential, 1992, etc.) offers a discontinuous series of short takes on offbeat enterprises that have yielded the venturesome Americans who launched or embraced them modest amounts of fame and fortune. Cases in point range from the leading breeder of racing pigs through the inventor of the car- crushing leviathans known as monster trucks and Florida's top vendor of recycled golf balls to the two struggling illustrators who created Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Covered as well are the proprietors of nail-care salons, traffic-safety schools, and the seemingly endless parade of lurid talk shows on daytime television, plus the resourceful aerospace engineer who first thought of blasting bullet holes in wearing apparel as a lucrative fashion statement. In most instances, unfortunately, the author goes beyond poking gentle fun at his subjects and their antics; indeed, he invariably holds them up to gratuitously savage ridicule. Nor can Geist resist any opportunity to show what a clever fellow he is, even when a straightforward account of junk entertainment like ``American Gladiators'' could speak for itself. All too often the effect is akin to the tedious pall cast by a stand-up comic who, bedazzled by his own wit, can't bear to leave the stage. While the author closes with backhanded homage to Judge Roy Hofheinz (builder of Houston's pace-setting Astrodome), a start-to-finish audit of his other vignettes reveals that they reach no particularly startling conclusions about the latter-day US or any other substantive matter. Sporadically amusing but wholly dispensable.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13883-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
A timely, comprehensive, and often interesting argument that the most pressing issue the Middle East faces is not land and borders but rather the supply and distribution of the region's water. A soil scientist with extensive consulting experience throughout the world, Hillel (Plant and Soil Science/Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst; Out of the Earth, 1990) reveals how, in one of the world's most strategic and parched areas, ecological considerations, particularly concerning water supplies, may influence geopolitics as much as summit meetings, police forces, and arms build-ups. Hillel focuses on the region's four great rivers: the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Jordan. He shows how a 1967 dispute between Israel and Syria over water rights was a contributing cause to the Six-Day War; how Iraq and Syria nearly came to blows with Turkey in 1990 over distribution of water from the Euphrates; and how there has been considerable tension between Jordan and Saudi Arabia over an aquifer (a water-bearing layer of permeable rock and a rare geological feature in the arid Middle East) from which both desert kingdoms draw. Hillel also suggests ways that nations can avoid disputes through intercountry and regional agreements, and he proposes various means of increasing water supplies and assuring effective use—e.g., desalination, cloud seeding, drip irrigation, and improved transmission (pipeline leakage wastes fully half the water intended for some Middle Eastern cities). This is an impressively interdisciplinary study that combines insights from geology, archaeology, etymology, biblical and other ancient Near East studies, modern history, soil science, agronomy, ecology, and contemporary political analysis. At times, Hillel floods the reader with highly technical data that will interest only hydrologists or other specialists. Generally, however, this is a clearly written, often colorful, accessible, and useful work of regional studies.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-508068-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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