A work of true crime as much as scholarship, highly readable and maddening.
A revealing look at how a secretive, often criminal element enables the rich to “make and protect not only their money, but also their reputations.”
Hoang, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, takes a deep dive into the everyday economics of “frontier markets,” places where investors make fortunes by greasing the palms of willing government officials and bankers. One such place is Vietnam, where, one wheeler-dealer told her, business students have to abandon their models as mere “bullshit” precisely because “there are too many unpredictable variables.” Instead, that source noted, an investor must be adept at “playing in the grey”—i.e., operating in the vast area that lies between legal and illegal economic activity and all too often strays into the criminal. The gray zone harbors a massive network of enablers and go-betweens who perform such essential tasks as laundering money and helping investors avoid paying taxes. The result is the titular “spiderweb capitalism,” in which “most capital accumulation takes off through a set of transactions that are often considered corrupt and dirty.” Of course, spiderwebs are designed to trap prey, and the prey in question are ordinary taxpayers and law-abiding citizens. Close to the center of the web are the ultrawealthy, surrounded by concentric rings of “fixers” who attend to their needs for a surprisingly small portion of the proceeds, selling themselves cheap. Often, these are financial insiders who do such useful things as disguising the location of their beneficiaries, since, as Hoang notes, “offshore funds and banks are less likely to do business with anyone who has a US mailing address or passport” because of comparatively stringent U.S. tax laws. In this well-written study, Hoang shows how inequality is a direct consequence of this spiderweb capitalism, which constitutes a zero-sum game in which drug cartels, organized crime, and the superrich are indistinguishable.
A work of true crime as much as scholarship, highly readable and maddening.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-691-22911-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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