A well-researched, informative and accessible look at important economic and agricultural issues.
New Scientist environmental and development consultant Pearce (The Coming Population Crash, 2010, etc.) documents widespread global “land grabs” by moneyed interests and the dire consequences for poor people around the world.
In this wide-ranging but efficient book, the author looks at how purchases by foreign investors of massive tracts of land in countries in Africa, South America, the former Soviet bloc and elsewhere have often caused local ruin. Impoverished residents of these countries, he writes, often lose their land, homes and livelihoods as they are evicted to make way for new projects. Most often those projects are massive industrial farms, with the majority of profits enriching foreign companies and their investors. Pearce is acclaimed for his keen environmental reporting in books about water shortages (When the Rivers Run Dry, 2006) and climate change (With Speed and Violence, 2007), and here he discusses environmental impact, particularly regarding projects in which water sources are diverted or forests are razed. More often the author focuses on financial and societal consequences, particularly for those at the bottom of the economic totem pole. These big-ticket investment deals often influence and distort governments and the law. In one section, he details how international investment agreements can create an environment in which “[e]ven if the locals are starving or parched with thirst, in law the rights of the foreign investor come first.” He also writes of how even well-meaning conservation groups’ efforts to create protected wildlife zones in some countries can have the side effect of uprooting local residents. Pearce paints a bleak picture, with many seemingly insurmountable problems, but he provides an important look at a problem rarely discussed in the mainstream media.
A well-researched, informative and accessible look at important economic and agricultural issues.Pub Date: May 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0324-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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