women and life on earth bookshelf

Globalization

An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

by Arundhati Roy

South End Press, Published: 15 September, 2004,
158 pages
, ISBN: 0896087271 $9.60

"The battle to reclaim democracy is going to be a difficult one. It is a battle that must range across continents and countries. It must not acknowledge national boundaries, but if it is to succeed, it has to begin in America. The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society. Hundreds of thousands of you have survived the relentless propaganda you have been subjected to, and are actively fighting your own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the United States, that's as brave as any Iraqi or Afghan or Palestinian fighting for his or her homeland. I hate to disagree with your president: yours is by no means a great nation. But you could be a great people." --Arundhati Roy,

An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. Arundhati Roy masterfully draws the thread of empire through ostensibly disconnected arenas, highlighting the parallels between the poverty draft in the United States, caste poplitics in India, AIDS in South Africa, reconstruction contracts in Iraq, and the perverse machinery of mass media worldwide.

Essayist and novelist Arundhati Roy won the Book Prize for The God of Small Things, which spent 49 weeks on the New York Times bestseller lists and has been published in 33 languages.

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