<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Journalism not quite at its worst
Review: Goldstone's book has many good moments and points, and is at its best when describing what she has personally experienced while on the road. When she goes "off-road," however, problems begin: undocumented - most likely fake quotes - attributed to Fidel Castro, nonsensical statistics like a 7:1 ratio of men to women in Cuba (!) and a tendency to overcram the narrative with irrelevant diversions. The story of the Ludlow, Colorado, massacre is gripping in itself, but not necessary to tell a story of tourism in the modern world. In all, the book reads like a college undergrad term paper with miles of padding. Still it has its merits and does the basic job it set out to do, to trace the connection between international finance and tourist hot spots.
Rating: 
Summary: Too much and too little
Review: Goldstone's book has many good moments and points, and is at its best when describing what she has personally experienced while on the road. When she goes "off-road," however, problems begin: undocumented - most likely fake quotes - attributed to Fidel Castro, nonsensical statistics like a 7:1 ratio of men to women in Cuba (!) and a tendency to overcram the narrative with irrelevant diversions. The story of the Ludlow, Colorado, massacre is gripping in itself, but not necessary to tell a story of tourism in the modern world. In all, the book reads like a college undergrad term paper with miles of padding. Still it has its merits and does the basic job it set out to do, to trace the connection between international finance and tourist hot spots.
Rating:
Summary: Journalism not quite at its worst
Review: This is a book that tries to be serious, but misses the mark. Why a professor at Smith College would have it on his reading list might seem to be some sort of endorsement, but surely not.The book is full of errors, and badly edited. Everything from (obviously) a false ratio of men to women in Cuba, a reference to Central America as a country (!) to Herodotus's descriptions of Alexander the Great's incursions into Persia a hundred years before Alexander was even born. And where does she get a Cuban economy of $2.5 billion in 1999, when it was somewhere around ten times that amount. It's written in the sort of style one might encounter in a regional newspaper's week-end edition, hardly the stuff of serious study and research. Continuity is a little slipshod as one reads from page to page And there is no index. A fistful of errors means that one cannot trust the book. Not recommended.
<< 1 >>
| 
