Sarah or World on Fire

Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment Upside Down

Author: Kaylene Johnson

In Sarah, the first biography released of Governor Palin, author Kaylene Johnson draws upon personal interviews with Palin, her family, and other highly placed sources to explore Palin's family life, her upbringing in a devout Christian home, her political rise, and how she went from being a long-shot candidate to--potentially--one of the world's most powerful women and political figures. The book features dozens of family and political photos and contains source notes. An Epicenter Press book, distributed by Tyndale House. Tyndale will also provide a free online discussion guide designed to engage readers on the subject of faith and politics: FaithandPoliticsDiscussionGuide.com.

Chicago Tribune

There's an undeniable national buzz surrounding the first-term governor, seen by many Republicans as a fresh, new face to represent the party's future.

Alaska Magazine

Wildly popular, she's more than just a pretty face.

Sarah Palin is a politician of eye-popping integrity.

New interesting textbook: The Tacit Mode or Organizational Stress

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

Author: Amy Chua

For over a decade now, the reigning consensus has held that the combination of free markets and democracy would transform the third world and sweep away the ethnic hatred and religious zealotry associated with underdevelopment. In this astute, original, and surprising investigation of the true impact of globalization, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua explains why many developing countries are in fact consumed by ethnic violence after adopting free market democracy.

Chua shows how in non-Western countries around the globe, free markets have concentrated starkly disproportionate wealth in the hands of a resented ethnic minority. These “market-dominant minorities” – Chinese in Southeast Asia, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America and South Africa, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia – become objects of violent hatred. At the same time, democracy empowers the impoverished majority, unleashing ethnic demagoguery, confiscation, and sometimes genocidal revenge. She also argues that the United States has become the world’s most visible market-dominant minority, a fact that helps explain the rising tide of anti-Americanism around the world. Chua is a friend of globalization, but she urges us to find ways to spread its benefits and curb its most destructive aspects.

Publishers Weekly

A professor at Yale Law School, Chua eloquently fuses expert analysis with personal recollections to assert that globalization has created a volatile concoction of free markets and democracy that has incited economic devastation, ethnic hatred and genocidal violence throughout the developing world. Chua illustrates the disastrous consequences arising when an accumulation of wealth by "market dominant minorities" combines with an increase of political power by a disenfranchised majority. Chua refutes the "powerful assumption that markets and democracy go hand in hand" by citing specific examples of the turbulent conditions within countries such as Indonesia, Russia, Sierra Leone, Bolivia and in the Middle East. In Indonesia, Chua contends, market liberalization policies favoring wealthy Chinese elites instigated a vicious wave of anti-Chinese violence from the suppressed indigenous majority. Chua describes how "terrified Chinese shop owners huddled behind locked doors while screaming Muslim mobs smashed windows, looted shops and gang-raped over 150 women, almost all of them ethnic Chinese." Chua blames the West for promoting a version of capitalism and democracy that Westerners have never adopted themselves. Western capitalism wisely implemented redistributive mechanisms to offset potential ethnic hostilities, a practice that has not accompanied the political and economic transitions in the developing world. As a result, Chua explains, we will continue to witness violence and bloodshed within the developing nations struggling to adopt the free markets and democratic policies exported by the West. (On sale Dec. 24) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Globalization is not good for developing countries, insists Yale law professor Chua. It aggravates ethnic tensions by creating a small but abundantly wealthy new class and it's stimulating a new wave of anti-Americanism. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A nuanced contribution to the debate over whether free markets spread democracy or merely advance the McDonaldsization of the globe. The answer, writes Chua (Law/Yale Univ.), is that they do both—and then some, depending on local conditions. But more often than not, Chua holds, the imposition of so-called "free markets" in the so-called "developing world" means that a ruling elite, often ethnically distinct from the mass of the ruled, prospers far out of proportion to its number. By way of illustration, Chua offers, imagine that Chinese-Americans, representing about two percent of the US population, controlled the country's largest banks and most of its productive real estate, while the 75 percent of the population considered "white" owned no land and, worse, "had experienced no upward mobility as far back as anyone can remember": transfer the scenario abroad, "and you will have approximated the core social dynamic that characterizes much of the non-Western world." Market forces that bring still more wealth into the hands of the minority—Chinese, in the case of Indonesia, or Lebanese in the case of Sierra Leone—necessarily breed dissent and ethnic hatred. Political liberalization may do nothing to ease the tensions, Chua adds. Democratization in the Middle East, for instance, would likely mean only the rise of nationalist and fundamentalist regimes; corrupt and autocratic though they may be, the region's kings are still more liberal than those who would replace them should the majority rule. All this is very provocative, to be sure, but Chua defends her case well (and adds a damning footnote to the history of Enron along the way). Globalism is a fact of modern life, sheconcludes, but one destined to yield much bloodshed in the years to come—unless, she adds, the privileged minorities do the smart thing: spread the wealth while they still can. An antidote to the typical one-market tidings, and bad news for those contemplating investments abroad.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction: Globalization and Ethnic Hatred	1
Pt. 1	The Economic Impact of Globalization
1	Rubies and Rice Paddies: Chinese Minority Dominance in Southeast Asia	23
2	Llama Fetuses, Latifundia, and La Blue Chip Numero Uno: "White" Wealth in Latin America	49
3	The Seventh Oligarch: The Jewish Billionaires of Post-Communist Russia	77
4	The "Ibo of Cameroon": Market-Dominant Minorities in Africa	95
Pt. 2	The Political Consequences of Globalization
5	Backlash against Markets: Ethnically Targeted Seizures and Nationalizations	127
6	Backlash against Democracy: Crony Capitalism and Minority Rule	147
7	Backlash against Market-Dominant Minorities: Expulsions and Genocide	163
8	Mixing Blood: Assimilation, Globalization, and the Case of Thailand	177
Pt. 3	Ethnonationalism and the West
9	The Underside of Western Free Market Democracy: From Jim Crow to the Holocaust	189
10	The Middle Eastern Cauldron: Israeli Jews as a Regional Market-Dominant Minority	211
11	Why They Hate Us: America as a Global Market-Dominant Minority	229
12	The Future of Free Market Democracy	259
	Afterword	289
	Notes	295
	Index	335