Merchants Of Misery

Youth and Narcotics. Assassins of Youth. On Getting "Hooked". From Euphoria to Despair. A Panel of Prisoners. Doorway to the Underworld. Merchants of Misery. The Defense of Decency. "Kicking the Habit". Youth's Right to Know

Examines how corporations profit from the poor by bankrolling pawnshops and high-interest finance companies, and discusses current protests.

There was a time when humanity looked in the mirror and saw something precious, worth protecting and fighting for—indeed, worth liberating. But now, we are beset on all sides by propaganda promoting a radically different viewpoint. According to this idea, human beings are a cancer upon the Earth, a horde of vermin whose aspirations and appetites are endangering the natural order. This is the core of antihumanism. Merchants of Despair traces the pedigree of this ideology and exposes its pernicious consequences in startling and horrifying detail. The book names the chief prophets and promoters of antihumanism over the last two centuries, from Thomas Malthus through Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore. It exposes the worst crimes perpetrated by the antihumanist movement, including eugenics campaigns in the United States and genocidal anti-development and population-control programs around the world. Combining riveting tales from history with powerful policy arguments, Merchants of Despair provides scientific refutations to all of antihumanism’s major pseudo-scientific claims, including its modern tirades against nuclear power, pesticides, population growth, biotech foods, resource depletion, and industrial development.

Winner of the Booker Prize A historical novel set in the eighteenth century, Sacred Hunger is a stunning, engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed in the British Empire as it entered fully into the slave trade and spread it throughout its colonies. Barry Unsworth follows the failing fortunes of William Kemp, a merchant pinning his last chance to a slave ship; his son who needs a fortune because he is in love with an upper-class woman; and his nephew who sails on the ship as its doctor because he has lost all he has loved. The voyage meets its demise when disease spreads among the slaves and the captain's drastic response provokes a mutiny. Joining together, the sailors and the slaves set up a secret, utopian society in the wilderness of Florida, only to await the vengeance of the single-minded, young Kemp.

The reigning consensus holds 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 revelatory 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.

The Traders' War -- an omnibus edition of the third and fourth novels in Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series. Miriam was an ambitious business journalist in Boston. Until she was fired—then discovered, to her shock, that her lost family comes from an alternate reality. And although some of them are trying to kill her, she won't stop digging up secrets. Now that she knows she's inherited the family ability to walk between worlds, there's a new culture to explore. Her alternate home seems located around the Middle Ages, making her world-hopping relatives top dogs when it comes to "importing" guns and other gadgets from modern-day America. Payment flows from their services to U.S. drug rings—after all, world-skipping drug runners make great traffickers. In a land where women are property, she struggles to remain independent. Yet her outsider ways won't be tolerated, and a highly political arranged marriage is being brokered behind her back. If she can stay alive for long enough to protest. "These books are immense fun."--Locus At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.