A cleareyed account of man’s inhumanity to man and Earth. Read it to get informed, and then take action.
In a heart-wrenching narrative, Bales (Ending Slavery: How We Free Today's Slaves, 2007, etc.) explores modern slavery and the devastating effects on its victims as well as the environmental degradation caused by this morally reprehensible institution.
As co-founder and former president of Free the Slaves, the world’s largest abolitionist organization, the author has dedicated his life to exposing the evils of slavery. For his latest book, Bales traveled around the globe for seven years documenting the wretched lives of the enslaved and revealing how their forced work destroys the natural world. Weaving together interviews, history, and statistics, the author shines a light on how the poverty, chaos, wars, and government corruption create the perfect storm where slavery flourishes and environmental destruction follows. “When we better understand the interrelationship of environmental issues and human rights,” he writes, “we’re likely to see in many ways that working to solve one can help to solve the other.” In this system, men, women, and children are lured into work extracting the various commodities our modern appetites desire, including gold from Ghana, shrimp from Bangladesh, granite from India, and timber from Brazil. Bales provides an excellent account of the 11-step supply chain required for procuring the minerals needed to build cellphones and laptops, revealing the individuals involved at each stop along the way, from slaves working in the Congolese mines to the consumer with his or her cellphone in hand. The author offers some hope for change, as well, describing various slave-free models, including the development of small family farms, cooperatives, and small-scale mines. Bales prods readers to consider the origins of our consumer products and the conditions under which they are made. While taking these steps will only cause “some inconvenience” for most of us, “small choices, made at the right moment, can bring very big changes.” Bales also includes a list of organizations working for change in the Eastern Congo.
A cleareyed account of man’s inhumanity to man and Earth. Read it to get informed, and then take action.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9576-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
The author’s literate, committed voice sometimes disappears in his tangled wood of allusion and quotation.
The veteran Washington Post columnist and TV commentator offers a richly documented history of and argument for a wider embrace of conservative political values.
“Richly documented” is an understatement. Will (A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred, 2014, etc.) is nothing if not a thorough, dedicated researcher and thinker, but he’s often prolix. Many of the historical figures the author references will come as no surprise—e.g., Burke, Moynihan, Madison, Locke—and there are also plenty from the literary world; these include allusions to Twain and Fitzgerald, whose closing sentences from The Great Gatsby provide Will with a metaphor for his principal points. Not much the Pulitzer winner offers here will surprise those who have paid attention to his rhetoric over the decades. His three American heroes remain: Washington, Lincoln, John Marshall. He thinks the U.S. government has grown too big, that it is too interested in providing entitlements (Will is a believer in much more self-reliance than he sees evident today), that schools and universities should do a much more rigorous job of transmitting the Western historical heritage, and that progressives just don’t understand how America is supposed to work. However, in one chapter, he may surprise some readers: He declares he is an atheist (though “amiable, low-voltage”), and he spends a few pages reminding us that the founders were not particularly religious and that we must observe the separation of church and state. He praises the civil rights movement but asserts that much of it has gone wrong. Oddly missing are direct references to the current occupant of the White House, though Will does zing many of his predecessors (from both parties but principally Democrats), mostly for their failure to comprehend fully the concept of liberty that fueled the founders.
The author’s literate, committed voice sometimes disappears in his tangled wood of allusion and quotation.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-48093-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Daniels emerges as a force to be reckoned with—and not someone to cross. Of interest to politics junkies but with plenty of...
A lively, candid memoir from person-in-the-news Daniels.
The author is a household name for just one reason, as she allows—adding, though, that “my life is a lot more interesting than an encounter with Donald Trump.” So it is, and not without considerable effort on her part. Daniels—not her real name, but one, she points out, that she owns, unlike the majority of porn stars—grew up on the wrong side of town, the product of a broken home with few prospects, but she is just as clearly a person of real intelligence and considerable business know-how. Those attributes were not the reason that Trump called her on a fateful night more than a decade ago, but she put them to work, so much so that in some preliminary conversation, he proclaimed—by her account, his talk is blustery and insistent—that “our businesses are kind of a lot alike, but different.” The talk led to what “may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.” The details are deeply unpleasant, but Daniels adds nuance to the record: She doesn’t find it creepy that Trump likened her to his daughter, and she reckons that as a reality show host, he had a few points in his favor even if he failed to deliver on a promise to get her on The Apprentice. The author’s 15 minutes arrived a dozen years later, when she was exposed as the recipient of campaign hush money. Her account of succeeding events is fast-paced and full of sharp asides pointing to the general sleaziness of most of the players and the ugliness of politics, especially the Trumpian kind, which makes the porn industry look squeaky-clean by comparison.
Daniels emerges as a force to be reckoned with—and not someone to cross. Of interest to politics junkies but with plenty of lessons on taking charge of one’s own life.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-20556-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2018
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