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THE CHILE PROJECT

THE STORY OF THE CHICAGO BOYS AND THE DOWNFALL OF NEOLIBERALISM

A closely argued study of the merits and demerits of free market economics in action.

The history of the economic shock that accompanied the right-wing military coup in Chile in 1973.

In 1955, the U.S. State Department launched a project in which Chilean economists were trained in the free market fundamentalism of Milton Friedman. When Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government of Salvador Allende, “the first Marxist politician to be freely elected as a head of state in any country,” the “Chicago Boys,” as they were called, went to work undoing Allende’s socialist reforms and installing policies that included the privatization of social security, the use of school vouchers, and the abolition of thousands of regulations. As Edwards, a professor of economics and former chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank, writes, the economists “would soon find out how different pontificating from the ivory tower was from actually implementing policies aimed at changing decades of entrenched policies.” Still, Chile eventually found its footing as a bastion of neoliberalism, and in the early 2000s, “Chile became, by a wide margin, the wealthiest nation in Latin America.” The nation was also marked by predatory capitalism and shocking inequality, a situation that was just fine by Friedman but was anathema to the working people of Chile—and was “a serious weakness that was mostly ignored by the architects of the model and that would come to haunt them.” Additionally, given that neoliberalism is globalist, Chile was long hampered in international trade by its status as a pariah nation thanks to the very military dictatorship that had brought the Chicago Boys to the fore. For all its successes, neoliberal Chile came to suffer from the failure of privatized social security. With the election of the leftist activist Gabriel Boric to the presidency in 2021, Chile is now abandoning many Chicago tenets in order to “move away from markets and competition.” Throughout, Edwards maintains a detailed yet accessible narrative.

A closely argued study of the merits and demerits of free market economics in action.

Pub Date: May 23, 2023

ISBN: 9780691208626

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Princeton Univ.

Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023

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THE MESSAGE

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Bearing witness to oppression.

Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024

ISBN: 9780593230381

Page Count: 176

Publisher: One World/Random House

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

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WAR

An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.

Documenting perilous times.

In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”

An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024

ISBN: 9781668052273

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024

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