Book description
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 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.
Alex Perry is Time's Africa Bureau Chief, based in Cape
Town. From 2002 to 2006, he was South Asia bureau chief, based in New
Delhi, and covering locations from Afghanistan to Burma. He has won
several journalism awards, and his report from the battle at
Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan was featured in The Best American
Magazine Writing 2002.
