Falling Off the Edge
Globalization, World Peace and Other Lies
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- 4,99 €
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- 4,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, international corporations and governments have embraced the idea of a global village: a shrinking, booming world in which everyone benefits. What if that's not the case? Alex Perry, award-winning foreign correspondent, travels from the South China Sea to the highlands of Afghanistan to the Sahara to see first-hand globalization at the sharp end -- and it's not pretty.
Whether it's Shenzen, China's boom city where sweatshops pay under-age workers less than $4 a day, or Bombay, where the gap between rich and poor means million-dollar apartments overlook million-people slums, or on the high seas with the pirates of southeast Asia who prey on the world's central trade artery, or South Africa, where Mandela's dream for a Rainbow Nation is being crushed by a new economic apartheid, Perry demonstrates, vividly and chillingly, that for every winner in our brave new world, there are hundreds of millions of losers. And be they Chinese army veterans, Indian Maoist rebels or the Somali branch of al Qaeda, they are all very, very angry.
Falling Off the Edge is an adrenaline-charged journey through the developing world, which reveals with clarity that globalization starts wars. Far from living in a time of peace and prosperity, Perry suggests, the boom is about to go bang.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Time's Africa bureau chief, Perry belongs to a cadre of journalists who thrive in the thick of a war zone; he admits that his editor once commented that "someone had died in the opening paragraph of every story I had written." Because he's seen so much, the book would have hit the mark had he fully probed the stories of his subjects, among them Indonesian pirates, Bombay's vacuous elite and a Muslim Indian terrorist who "predicts a future of relentless violence." Unfortunately, his book is poorly organized and dizzyingly disjointed; he dissects the prodigious growth of Asian cities, jets north to comment on the reign of the Nepali king and flies south to interview a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber. The stories don't build to any concrete conclusion, individually or collectively. Perry is sincere but his analysis is simplistic; he dismisses the opinions of academics who haven't first traveled extensively in Asia and Africa and concludes China will "make it" because China's central government "gets it" while India "looks a lot shakier." Perry's firsthand experience provides one necessary piece but not enough of the puzzle to construct an accurate picture of the consequences of globalization.
