What the hell is that, a Chinese GTA ripoff? It's awful.
What makes the cover art even more terrible is that the GQ quote on the cover isn't that far off. Glenny's written a wonderfully informative, perceptive book on global organized crime that I think really is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the world works.
The only unfortunate aspect of the book is that sometimes Glenny starts propounding solutions. Occasionally these are obvious ones; he agrees with such hideous left-wing anarchists as the Economist magazine that drugs should be legalized, and his book is an excellent argument in favor of legalization.
On the other hand, though, because he's mainly concerned with organized crime, this leads him to take rather a strange perspective on some things. For example, he details the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the criminal gangs, mafias and oligarchs that took control in Russia. Because he sees all of these as inherently negative, in Glenny's book Vladimir Putin assumes a heroic status as a champion of law and order! To anyone in the least bit familiar with Russia's burgeoning securocracy this is at the very least amusing, but really closer to frightening.
Sometimes Glenny calls for wider international measures to control something or the other, and several reviews of his book, like the one linked to on the Wikipedia page at salon.com, make the explicit comparison that international affairs must be regulated by a supranational entity just like the markets must be regulated. This is all so much left-wing claptrap, but luckily it very rarely distracts from the point of the book, which is to take the reader on a guided tour of the world of organized crime.
Mmm. Or-ganized crime.
**
Definitely a book worth reading, despite some of its biases. This should be essential reading to anyone who wants to talk about drugs, prostitution, human trafficking or terrorism.
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