A lucid, accessible introduction to globalism and its discontents.
A smart and engaging look at how US consumerism swept aside European cultural conservatism to create a transatlantic, transnational market.
Globalism has an American face, writes de Grazia (History/Columbia Univ.), but perhaps not for much longer. While 80 percent of Europe’s 519 million inhabitants are by now accustomed to going to supermarkets, just shy of the 85 percent mark in the US, the leading innovator in getting people in China and South America to shop one-stop is now Carrefour, a French firm. (Carrefour, she adds, is even beating out Wal-Mart in China, but facing stiff competition from Taiwanese and Thai chains.) Thus the wheel turns, set in motion by the expansion of the American “Market Empire” throughout the 20th century; the resultant economic and political hegemony “was built on European territory,” where American concerns had to combat patterns of production and trade long established by the European bourgeoisie. Overturning the old order was spurred on by both the demands of local peoples for better living standards and by the occasion of two world wars that opened European markets; when the second finished off the ancien régime, programs such as the Marshall Plan were on hand to build a consumer society friendly to US goods from tractors to films to hula hoops. Just so, the European success of firms such as McDonald’s has depended on changing local habits to conform to American models—doing away with the extended lunch break, making long commutes the norm, and so on. Yet, de Grazia notes, even the Marshall Plan had competitors, such as England’s Beveridge Report, which hinted at ways of rebuilding that lacked the American “overweening confidence in technology, raucous commercialism, and tolerance for social wreckage as the price paid for progress.” The US model is looking shopworn at the beginning of the 21st century—but even if it has a different accent, the Market Empire endures.
A lucid, accessible introduction to globalism and its discontents.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-674-01672-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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