Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the
Global Economy
by Moises Naim
In Praise of Slowness: How A Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the
Cult of Speed
by Carl Honore
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
by Daniel C. Dennett
Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy
by Fawaz A. Gerges
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War
by Barbara Ehrenreich
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Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the
Global Economy
by Moises Naim
Amazon.com
Illicit activities are exploding worldwide. The onslaught of
globalization has unleashed a tidal wave of bad stuff--everything from
arms trafficking, human smuggling, and money laundering to music
bootlegging. Here is the dark side of globalization: the mushrooming
underground economy. Moisés Naím explores this murky world in his book
Illicit. Naím is the editor of the relaunched magazine Foreign Policy
and a former executive director of the World Bank and Minister of
Trade and Industry of Venezuela. In Illicit, he unties the connections
between the Colombian cocaine dealer, the New York banker steering
money to offshore tax havens, the Albanian forcing women into
prostitution, and the Chinese market stall-holder selling counterfeit
DVDs.
Naím reports that legitimate global trade has doubled since 1990 from
$5 to $10 trillion. Meanwhile, money laundering has gone up tenfold,
exceeding $1 trillion a year. Smuggling and money laundering have
always existed, but Naím shows how they have increased at a staggering
pace in the wake of globalization, despite new government controls
since 9/11. The main culprits are the collapse of the Iron Curtain and
state deregulation. As the reach of organized crime has expanded,
governments have failed to keep up. Naím illustrates the problems with
stories about A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb who sold
nuclear technology to North Korea and Libya; Walter C. Anderson, an
American who was accused of hiding $450 million in offshore accounts
to evade taxes; and Vladimir Montesinos, the Peruvian intelligence
czar who is on trial for trafficking drugs and arms. The book, while a
little dry, will be interesting to policy buffs and aspiring crooks
alike.
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In Praise of Slowness: How A Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the
Cult of Speed
by Carl Honore
From Publishers Weekly
A former "speedaholic," an award-winning Canadian journalist advocates
living a slower, more measured existence, in virtually every area, a
philosophy he defines as "balance." Honore's personal wake-up call
came when he began reading one-minute bedtime stories to his
two-year-old son in order to save time. The absurdity of this practice
dramatized how he, like most of the world, was caught up in a speed
culture that probably began with the Industrial Revolution, was
spurred by urbanization and increased dramatically with 20th-century
advances in technology. The author explores, in convincing and
skillful prose, a quiet revolution known as "the slow movement," which
is attempting to integrate the advances of the information age into a
lifestyle that is marked by an "inner slowness" that gives more depth
to relationships with others and with oneself. Although there is no
official movement, Honore credits Carol Petrini, an Italian culinary
writer and founder of the slow food movement in Italy, with
spearheading the trend to using fresh local foods, grown with
sustainable farming techniques that are consumed in a leisurely manner
with good company. The author also explores other slow movements, such
as the practice of Tantric sex (mindful sexual union as a road to
enlightenment), complementary and alternative medicine, new urbanism
and the importance of leisure activities like knitting, painting and
music. For the overprogrammed and stressed, slow and steady may win
the race.
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Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
by Daniel C. Dennett
From Publishers Weekly
In his characteristically provocative fashion, Dennett, author of
Darwin's Dangerous Idea and director of the Center for Cognitive
Studies at Tufts University, calls for a scientific, rational
examination of religion that will lead us to understand what purpose
religion serves in our culture. Much like E.O. Wilson (In Search of
Nature), Robert Wright (The Moral Animal), and Richard Dawkins (The
Selfish Gene), Dennett explores religion as a cultural phenomenon
governed by the processes of evolution and natural selection. Religion
survives because it has some kind of beneficial role in human life,
yet Dennett argues that it has also played a maleficent role. He
elegantly pleads for religions to engage in empirical self-examination
to protect future generations from the ignorance so often fostered by
religion hiding behind doctrinal smoke screens. Because Dennett offers
a tentative proposal for exploring religion as a natural phenomenon,
his book is sometimes plagued by generalizations that leave us wanting
more ("Only when we can frame a comprehensive view of the many aspects
of religion can we formulate defensible policies for how to respond to
religions in the future"). Although much of the ground he covers has
already been well trod, he clearly throws down a gauntlet to religion.
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Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy
by Fawaz A. Gerges
From Publishers Weekly
In September 2005, Gerges, an academic turned news commentator,
published a rare and thoughtful piece of scholarship, The Far Enemy,
that sought to map the different views within militant Islam's
explosive underworld. Gerges argued nimbly, drawing upon numerous
primary sources and firsthand interviews. After traveling across the
Middle East and meeting with former jihadists, he learned that Islamic
militants often disagreed on critical issues (including whether to
attack the United States) and that their movement was far more
variegated than Washington's official portrayal suggests. Published
less than a year later, this new volume reads like a quicky follow-up.
It covers similar ground, draws upon similar sources and is
considerably more limited in its scholarly aspirations—although not,
perhaps, in its commercial ones. Yet the follow-up may be the better
book. Gerges has distilled his ideas to their core and done away with
some of The Far Enemy's repetitions. The book's structure is also
improved. It's now built around a series of profiles that give focus
to each chapter and shed light on how key personalities within the
jihadist vanguard see the world. Gerges even devotes time to his own
upbringing in war-torn Lebanon, and although the veers into his
personal story are not always relevant, they are fascinating in their
own right, adding both intimacy and depth to this valuable book
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Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Amazon.com
In this ambitious work, Barbara Ehrenreich offers a daring explanation
for humans' propensity to wage war. Rather than approach the subject
from a physiological perspective, pinpointing instinct or innate
aggressiveness as the violent culprit, she reaches back to primitive
man's fear of predators and the anxieties associated with life in the
food chain. To deal with the reality of living as prey, she argues
that blood rites were created to dramatize and validate the
life-and-death struggle. Jumping ahead to the modern age, Ehrenreich
brands nationalism a more sophisticated form of blood ritual, a
phenomenon that conjures similar fears of predation, whether in the
form of lost territory or the more extreme ethnic cleansing. Blood
Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War may not offer a cure
for human aggression, but the author does present a convincing
argument for the difficulties associated with achieving peace.