Ocean State Libraries

Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?

Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are?
Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana...

The landmark alternative history of the Cold War from the perspective of the Global South. In this award-winning investigation into the overlooked history of the Third World-with a new preface by the author for its fifteenth anniversary-internationally renowned historian Vijay Prashad conjures what Publishers Weekly calls "a vital assertion of an alternative future." The Darker Nations, praised by critics as a welcome antidote to apologists for empire,...

Presents opposing opinions on such questions concerning the Third World as why it is poor, how it can achieve economic development, and what forms of government would best serve its needs.

"Since the end of World War II, economists have tried to figure out how poor countries in the tropics could attain standards of living approaching those of countries in Europe and North America. Attempted remedies have included providing foreign aid, investing in machines, fostering education, controlling population growth, and making aid loans as well as forgiving those loans on condition of institutional reforms." "In this book Easterly shows how...

Monograph on energy policies for developing countries - discusses power demand, power consumption and the world energy crisis, non renewable and renewable energy sources, and suggests energy conservation, increasing domestic power supply (incl. Petroleum, coal, gas and fuels), and improving energy efficiency and international cooperation for long term energy transition. Diagrams, graph, maps, references and statistical tables.

We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts...