The World: A Beginner’s Guide
Göran Therborn
It’s quite a feat for an inelegantly written book loaded with facts and statistics to be this interesting, but Therborn’s “sociocultural geology” and survey of today’s world had me making mental notes throughout. A particularly salient point that I took away was the reassertion of class over nationality as the prime determining factor in contemporary global lifeways – reversing a trend that began in the post-industrialized rupture of the world into developed and developing countries. Deindustrialization, however, has also led to the political neutering of the working class and the poor. In a brief conclusion that looks ahead to where we’re heading Therborn suggests the need for a world structured very differently, but the prognosis he delivers is not very hopeful.
goodreports.net 