A Falling off the Edge: Travels Through the Dark Heart of Globalization
Author: Alex Perry
If the world is flat, as the prophets of globalization proclaim, then what happens on the underside? Alex Perry answers with this eye-opening journey through the planet's most dangerous hotspots
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, international corporations, governments and Western pundits have embraced the idea of a global village: a shrinking, booming world in which everyone benefits. But what if the coming boom is an explosion?
Alex Perry, award-winning TIME correspondent, travels from the South China Sea to the highlands of Afghanistan to the Sahara—and observes globalization on the ground, instead of from the executive suite.
Perry takes readers to Shenzen, China's boom city where sweatshops pay under-age workers less than $4 a day; and to Bombay, where the gap between rich and poor means million-dollar apartments overlook million-people slums. He shares a beer with Southeast Asian pirates who prey on the world's busiest shipping artery. And he puts us in the middle of a firefight between American Special Forces and the Taliban.
He shows that for every winner in our brave new world, there are tens of thousands of losers. And be they Chinese army veterans, Indian Maoist rebels or the Somali branch of al Qaeda, they are very, very angry.
Falling Off the Edge is a tour de force of frontline reporting, which reveals with alarming clarity that globalization, far from a planetary panacea, starts wars.
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. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Sarah Statz Cords - Library Journal
Time magazine's Africa bureau chief, Perry opens with a story of the Stone Age Jarawa tribe and their encounters with modern society in 1997. It's an arresting but somewhat jarring start that sets the rather uneven tone of the book. Perry has covered his share of conflicts and has a journalist's eye for telling details. In four different sections, he investigates global hotspots, details conflicts resulting from resource competition and differing worldviews, describes how confusing it can be to determine who is really benefiting from globalization, and questions whether war will always be a part of the human experience, regardless (or because) of shifting borders. Each chapter offers firsthand reports from frontiers of global competition, including Shenzhen (China), Bombay, Nepal, Kenya, and Karbala (Iraq). The book's downfall is that it proceeds from location to location with very little cohesiveness, and Perry can't quite seem to decide whether his subject is business, politics, society, or war. Perhaps that is the point, but it still makes for disjointed reading. Larger public libraries may consider it to round out their international affairs collections; otherwise, not recommended.
Kirkus Reviews
Globalization sounds good in theory but proves disastrous in practice, Time Africa bureau chief Perry demonstrates. Covering hot spots from South Asia to South Africa, the author reports some alarming developments since 9/11. Globalization-that is, a cost-directed consolidation of capital, labor and markets that Perry characterizes as "global governance without global government"-tends to enrich the few and impoverish the many, accelerating a worldwide sense of injustice and resentment. Despite buoyant growth in such developing nations as China and India, real income of the poorest ten percent is falling, exacerbated by the fact that population growth often outstrips economic growth. The explosion of crime, worsening of pollution, growing AIDS populations, spread of Islamic fundamentalism and war all have roots in the globalization frenzy, the author systematically reveals. In China, for example, the city of Shenzhen seems to be booming, exhibiting "the same energy, the same-get ahead ethos and the same towering respect for a buck" as nearby Hong Kong. But it's "an unregulated free-for-all . . . Tijuana, with Chinese characteristics," writes Perry. Sweatshops operate with impunity, and there's a brisk trade in illegal wares of every sort, including endangered species served as restaurant food. In India, "offshoring" (moving labor West to East) is not proving to be the country's panacea; there is no middle class, infrastructure or education to speak of, and while a handful get richer, 900 million Indians still earn $2 per day or less. The author traces the origins of several key wars, such as those in Nigeria and Darfur, in terms of spreading global misery, some of it due to climate changedirectly linked to Western pollution. Maoists in Nepal, Naxals in India and Tamils in Sri Lanka-not to mention al-Qaeda-all target the instruments of modern-day globalization. Perry, to his great credit, is on the beat, scratching under surfaces and helping to clear away the obfuscation around this important issue. A critical look at the myths and national delusions surrounding globalization. Agent: Howard Yoon/Gail Ross Literary Agency
Table of Contents:
Contents Prologue....................1PART I - INCOMING 1 Boom, then Bang....................9
2 Speed Bumps in Shenzhen....................00
3 Waking Up in Bombay....................00
PART II - FIVE FIGHTS 4 Crime Wars....................000
5 Oil and Water....................000
6 The New Left Revolution....................000
7 Tribes, and the Cult of the Martyr....................000
8 Fire-starters....................000
PART III - FOG 9 First Casualty....................000
10 The Myth of Asia....................000
11 Leadership....................000
PART IV - POST MORTEM 12 Is War Good?....................000
Endnotes....................000
Acknowledgements....................000
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Sun Tzu's Art of War--Spirituality for Conflict: Annotated and Explained
Author: Sun Tzu
Written 2,500 years ago by Chinese general Sun Tzu, The Art of War is a poetic and potent treatise on military strategy still in use in war colleges around the world. Yet its principles transcend warfare and have practical applications to all the conflicts and crises we face in our lives-in our workplaces, our families, even within ourselves.
Thomas Huynh guides you through Sun Tzu's masterwork, highlighting principles that encourage a perceptive and spiritual approach to conflict, enabling you to: Prevent conflicts before they arise, Peacefully and quickly resolve conflicts when they do arise, Act with courage, intelligence and benevolence in adversarial situations, Convert potential enemies into friends, Control your emotions before they control you.
Now you can experience the effectiveness of Sun Tzu's teachings even if you have no previous knowledge of The Art of War. Insightful yet unobtrusive facing-page commentary explains the subtleties of the text, allowing you to unlock the power of its teachings and help prevent and resolve the conflicts in your own life.
Graham Christian Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information - School Library Journal
In Japan and China, certain kinds of athletic and military practices are absolutely continuous with self-knowledge and spiritual awareness. No rediscovered classic has enjoyed greater currency than Sun Tzu's Art of War, which has been repackaged as a kind of ancient business manual. Skylight Paths has restored Sun's place among spiritual classics of the East with this fresh, new, annotated translation of a timely and perennially popular classic for a nonscholarly audience.
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