Rogue Economics or Holy Roller

Rogue Economics: Capitalism's New Reality

Author: Loretta Napoleoni

Economist and syndicated journalist Loretta Napoleoni argues that the world is undergoing rapid and unexpected great transformations fueled by what she calls rogue economics. Eagerly awaited around the world (translation rights have already been sold throughout Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia), Napoleoni's account is based on top-to-bottom primary-source interviews from banking executives in New York to Russian prostitutes to London morgue workers, and grounded in the author's personal experience in international finance. From Eastern Europe's booming sex trade industry to China's "online sweatshops," from al-Qaeda's underwriters to America's subprime mortgage lending scandal, Rogue Economics exposes the paradoxical economic connections of the new global marketplace.

Loretta Napoleoni is the author of the best-selling book Terror Inc.: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism, which has been translated into twelve languages. One of the world's leading experts on money laundering and terror financing, she has worked as London correspondent and columnist for Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, El Pais, and Le Monde. A former Fulbright scholar, she holds a PhD in economics, an MA in international relations and economics from Johns Hopkins University, and an MPhil in terrorism from the London School of Economics. For her work as a consultant for the commodities markets, she traveled regularly to Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries, where she has met top financial and political leaders. She lives in London.

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. After looking into how terrorism gets paid for (Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism), Napoleoni tackles the whole of capitalism's dark side: the economics of illegal, criminal and terrorist activities worldwide. There's no shortage of material, including the sex trade of Eastern Europe, internet fraud, piracy (both nautical and intellectual), human slavery, drugs and even the subprime mortgage lending scandal. Unsettling, eye-opening statistics abound-one third of all fish eaten in the UK is illegally poached; today, 27 million slaves worldwide generate annual profits of $31 billion; up until 9/11, 80 percent of the $1.5 trillion underworld economy was laundered through the US (the Patriot Act moved much of this business to Europe)-and Napoleoni's bold analysis begs controversy. From page one, she ties the illegal business boom directly to the spread of democracy, pointing to the fall of the Berlin Wall as the moment when "rogue economics" were unleashed in their current, globe-enveloping iteration. Timely and fascinating, Napoleoni's top-notch reporting, in which her attention turns from Viagra to blood diamonds to the banana price wars in a few pages, works in the vein of Freakonomics and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, but much grimmer. Like those, this volume doesn't provide many answers, but the questions it raises are profound.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book review: Diagnosis for Organizational Change or Mandarins of the Future

Holy Roller: Growing up in the Church of Knock down, Drag Out: or, How I Quit Loving a Blue-Eyed Jesus

Author: Diane Wilson

In this rollicking memoir, Diane Wilson-a Texas Gulf Coast shrimper and the author of the highly acclaimed An Unreasonable Woman-takes readers back to her childhood in rural Texas and into her family of Holy Rollers. By night at tent revivals, Wilson gets religion from Brother Dynamite, an ex-con who finds Jesus in a baloney sandwich and handles masses of squirming poisonous snakes under the protection of the Holy Ghost. By day, Wilson scratches secret messages to Jesus into the paint on her windowsill and lies down in the middle of the road to see how long she can sleep in between passing trucks.
Holy Roller is a fast-paced, hilarious, sometimes shocking experience readers won't soon forget. It is the prequel to Wilson's first book, telling the story of the Texas childhood of a fierce little girl who will grow up to become An Unreasonable Woman, take on Big Industry, and win. One of the best Southern writers of her generation, Wilson's voice twangs with a style and accent all its own, as true and individual as her boundless originality and wild youth.

Publishers Weekly

In her latest, shrimper and memoirist Wilson (An Unreasonable Woman) unspools the tale of her 1950s small-town upbringing along the Gulf Coast of Texas, the daughter of third-generation shrimpers. As in her first book, Wilson writes with a stylized cadence, sans extraneous punctuation, that readers will either take to or not: "Grandma ate Fritos in a glass of buttermilk for dinner and supper and that plus giving the radio evangelist all her shrimp-heading money was driving two of her daughters batty and two not so much." Her father, "a man's man who didn't talk unnecessarily to women," and is always off shrimping, leaves her to be raised by her eccentric mother and grandmother ("the original Waste Not Want Not-er... nothing was so low that it didn't get cooked into something else"), who nevertheless imbue her with strong, transcendent values. Meanwhile, a cast of characters that includes her Pentecostal Aunt Silver ("Pentecostals had faith and faith was the absence of planning") and a snake-handling Brother Dynamite lead her through a clash between the Church of Jesus Loves You and an upstart backwoods congregation. Wilson's distinctive voice makes for some whip-smart passages, and her southern Gothic world, a colorful and unpredictable place, is fully identifiable in its commitment to vice-tight family love and responsibility to some higher power.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Janet Ingraham Dwyer - Library Journal

These two vivid memoirs, in very distinct voices, recollect childhood in the context-well, in the clutches-of all-encompassing religion. Wilson's fierce determination and passion characterized her first memoir, An Unreasonable Woman, about her David vs. Goliath fight against a polluting Texas chemical company. Now she delves into her childhood in a hardscrabble Pentecostal shrimping family, surrounded by fire-and-brimstone preachers, radio evangelists, tongue-speakers, snake-handlers, and her own relatives-believing women and fallen-away men. Wilson's prose is breathtaking in its dexterity and blunt poetry, as when she recounts being conscripted as a scout to accompany her grandfather and Aunt Patty, under cover of night, to break into a game warden's riverside shack in pursuit of an incriminating gun. Wilson evokes in her rural Gulf Coast setting an exotic place at the intersection of transcendence and squalor, coated in oyster dust and the conviction that God saves (the Pentecostal believers, and no one else).

In contrast to Wilson's intensity, Turner offers a gentle, amused-and slightly bemused-recollection of his own Christian fundamentalist upbringing. His story begins on the day his four-year-old, formerly Methodist self gets affixed with a clip-on necktie and whooshed off to a new, independent Baptist church and ends, more or less, the day he receives an award at his high school graduation for being "Most Christ-like" (out of a class of four). In between, the author reflects on his pastor's overly loud sermons, his own struggle with the sin of dilly-dallying, and the foibles of growing up in a family that would, for instance, celebrate Christmas by throwing apoorly-thought-through birthday party for Jesus, featuring a cake with 33 lit candles. As reflected in his subtitle, Turner, who has written several books on Christian life, came through the experience with faith intact. Churched would have benefited from more exploration of how and why, but it is a solid, poignant, and funny memoir nonetheless. Both books are recommended for public libraries, and Wilson's is essential.