Victims of Development

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Claiming that ``the prescriptions of the West are actually a formula for impoverishment and loss to the world's poor,'' Seabrook ( The Landscapes of Poverty ) combines description and analysis of the effects of development in this meandering but impassioned book. He finds many heartbreaking examples of depredation in the ``Two-Thirds World'': Smoky Mountain, a Manila garbage dump inhabited by the poor and dislocated; the environmentally degraded tourist zone of Malaysia; the exploitative Thai sex tourism trade. He also sees the costs of such conditions to the West, observing the alienation created by the market's cruelties in his native Britain. Seabrook's search for solutions is understandably sketchy. He profiles a communal agricultural village in India and quotes several people on the importance of local, sustainable development. One Bangladeshi observes that the failure of Soviet socialism doesn't ``exonerate capitalism from its globally negative record.'' Seabrook suggests that rich countries should emphasize human resources and poor countries should gain a greater share of the wealth in order to move toward a more human notion of economic development. (Dec.)