Africa has long gone ignored almost everywhere outside Africa. But now that oil is scarcer and the continent has plenty of it, writes journalist/historian Ghazvinian, drillers and diplomats are paying attention.
Since 1990, Ghazvinian observes, the petroleum industry has invested $20 billion in exploration and development in Africa. In the next three years alone, another $50 billion will be spent, “and around one-third of it will come from the United States.” Most of this exploration centers around the Gulf of Guinea, a nearly ideal location, since it’s offshore and thus perhaps not subject to the whims of landlubber dictators and corrupt officialdom and civil wars, things that plague places such as Sierra Leone and Nigeria; the Gulf also offers easily accessible sea lanes leading to Europe and the Americas, and, perhaps best of all, no sub-Saharan African countries belong to OPEC. Considering the sorry state of some sorry African states, notably Equatorial Guinea, an “overnight emirate” whose oil wealth goes straight into the ruling family’s coffers, the oil developers are wise to stay out in the deep. Even so, Ghazvinian notes, because of the rich reserves the Gulf of Guinea holds, certainly as compared to the “sour” oil of places such as Chad, West Africa is now being overrun and contested; Nigeria and Angola jockey for political dominance in places such as São Tomé and Principe, shady neocolonialists wander the streets of West Africa’s capitals and everywhere one looks, China is suddenly a major presence, having smartly committed to foreign aid and infrastructure development while the West was looking the other way.
Ghazvinian’s grand-tour narrative has moments of lucid observation and sharp description that would do Graham Greene proud. Still, one wonders about his optimistic conclusion when past scrambles for Africa have hardly worked to Africans’ advantage.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101138-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
Categories: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | BUSINESS | GENERAL BUSINESS
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BOOK REVIEW
“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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SEEN & HEARD
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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