HOW TO SUCCEED AT GLOBALIZATION: A Primer for the Roadside Vendor

Mexican political cartoonist El Fisgón ("The Peeper") views history via economics in this sometimes amusing didactic work. For him, the villain is the free market economy model, and he blames globalization, Third World debt and the neoliberal economics of the IMF and WTO for every ill in society since the feudal age. While it's hard to argue that the neoliberal agenda has had generally disastrous consequences in South America and Africa since the 1980s, El Fisgón downplays the role that simple human greed plays in subverting every form of government, as the downfall of communism (which he acknowledges) shows. El Fisgón tells his story in a lively, accessible blend of text and pictures that prevents the work from coming across as a mere screed. Showing his versatility as an artist, El Fisgón mixes a variety of styles from elegantly realistic to broadly cartoony, along with images taken from Dürer and Doré to illustrate his wide-ranging thesis. As a broad economic history, the book often misses the mark with its simplistic finger-pointing. Its position on recent history—the belief, for instance, that the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were equally unwarranted—may come as a surprise to readers who think America is beloved in the rest of the Western Hemisphere. (July)