The result is an analysis that sings, though its melody turns increasingly sour.
Two Italians from different backgrounds offer call-and-response pieces on the post-millennial economic collapse.
The title, taken from Jim Morrison’s “Ghost Song,” and the opening evocation of U2’s Bono suggest from the start that this will not be a dry economic analysis restricted to the native Italy of the co-authors. Instead, the narrative is often impassionedly lyrical, both literary and musical in quality, as it proceeds from the unbridled optimism of the late 1990s to the abject hopelessness that the authors blame on globalization in general and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in particular. Nesi is a prizewinning novelist (Story of My People, 2013, etc.) and politician who had faced unemployment after being forced to sell the textile company that his grandfather started in the 1930s. Brera is the founder of an Italian investment management company that saw benefits from the economic downturn that plagued Southern Europe. Interestingly, alternating chapters find both authors following the same emotional arc, from a faith in “a future that had never before looked so promising,” amid the 1990s and its “grand, continuous, thrilling process of acceleration,” through “the disasters of globalization” and the “desperate, sentimental, Luddite war against the world and against the future.” What happened? Among other factors, outsourcing, cost-cutting, national debt, and, most egregiously, competition from demagogues that have had no respect for worker rights, environmental controls, or trademark protections under which the industrial West operated. Globalization promised to lift more than 1 billion people out of poverty, and it did, agree the authors—“one billion Chinese.” The analysis often soars as a work of sociocultural criticism, though it doesn’t offer much hope as economic analysis. Instead, it shows how hopes so high could be brought so low.
The result is an analysis that sings, though its melody turns increasingly sour.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-931-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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