| THE WORLD'S BANKER A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations Sebastian Mallaby New York: The Penguin Press, 2004 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-59420-023-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-59420-023-8 | 462pp. | HC | $29.95 | |
| Page 37: | "In the summer of 1979, Lee Iacocca, Chrysler's folk hero-boss, went cap in hand to Washington seeking a federal bailout." |
| Misplaced hyphen: S/B "folk-hero boss". |
| Page 45: | "In the 1960s, Ghana's government built a shoe factory, a sugar factory and a glass factory that never went into production; it erected a pharmaceutical factory where experimental animals were housed better than most Ghanaians." |
| I have no argument with the first part of this. Factories that never produce goods are wasted investment. But the mere fact that animals destined for drug research are well treated is no ipso facto admission of wasteful spending. Ethics aside, they have to be kept healthy to serve as controls, and to make sure the disease the drug is intended to treat is the only one affecting them. I don't know how "most Ghanaians" were living at this time, but their living conditions quite likely included poor diet and marginal sanitation. |
| Page 92: | " 'Nice Job!!! Enjoyable, readable, NON-BANKESE prose,' she exalted, before suggesting..." |
| Word choice: S/B "exulted". |
| Page 133: | "Years of setbacks in shambolic countries, years of hectoring by NGOs, and years inside the Bank's own velvety bureaucracy had combined to dull idealism." |
| Shambolic? |
| Page 154: | "But if the first rule of managerial reform is to exude a clear direction and purpose, Wolfenson had flunked it." |
| Nit: In the sense meant here, one violates a rule, or one flunks a test. If I were to say I had flunked a rule, I would mean it was the rule that was deemed defective, and I had passed judgement upon it. |
| Page 158: | "The Bank needed to break out of the craft age, with artisan-loan officers designing each project according to their individual styles." |
| Another misplaced hyphen: S/B "artisan loan-officers". (Unless the officers referred to are lending only to artisans, a far-fetched but arguable interpretation.) |
| Page 160: | "Whether this was altogether positive is a different question: The knowledge-sharing networks favored a perfectionist culture rather than a speedy one, and it encouraged the powerful tendency in the Bank to focus on internal process rather than outside clients." |
| To my way of thinking, this is a number error: S/B "they", referring to "networks". However, it may be that "it" refers back to the subject before the colon — "this" — in which case it would be correct. |
| Page 203: | "If the macrofolks still failed to get the message, well then Guggenheim was willing to go public." |
| Missing commas: S/B "well, then, Guggenheim was willing". (But the usage is correct if, sick, he would have been unwilling. <g>) |
| Page 207: | Capitalized leadoff of Chapter Eight: "IN THE FRST YEARS..." |
| Missing letter: S/B "FIRST". |
| Page 210: | "Direct attacks on the fund were straining the patience of the Clinton Treasury..." |
| S/B "Fund", since it refers to the International Monetary Fund. |
| Page 211: | "Across the world, Wolfenson continued, 3 billion live on under $2 a day; 1.3 billion have no access to clean water; 2 billion have no access to power." |
| Vague: S/B "electric power". (Yes, it's clear from the context that electric power is meant; but making it explicit rules out other interpretations, however strained, at a cost of only one additional word.) |
| Page 230: | "You were inviting civil society into the driver's seat before connecting the steering wheel to the engine." |
| Technically, this is nonsense: The steering wheel is not connected to the engine. However, it makes perfect sense as a metaphor. (Not as a meta-Ford, though: "Fábrica Ordinaria, Rotura Descompuesta".) |
| Page 273: | "When a World Bank delegation went up to the Hill to mollify the lawmakers, it was confronted with a map that did not even show Qinghai. The entire province had been labeled Tibetan, and never mind that Tibetans accounted for only one in five people living there." |
| Puzzling wording, since Qinghai is a province. |
| Page 302: | "Then at nine forty-three A.M. there was a judder in the distance, and the television news was announcing that a fire had broken out in the Pentagon..." |
| This word "judder" puzzled me. I thought it might be Newspeak for a jarring or jerking shudder. But it is a real word, meaning approximately what I guessed, and used mainly in Britain. (Mallaby is a Brit.) |
| Page 307: | "In January 2002, the annual Davos shmoozathon convened in New York..." |
| Spelling: S/B "schmoozathon". |
| Page 317: | "The math whiz walked into the office of a colleague who worked on AIDS, and told him the numbers must be screwy." |
| This refers to the calculation, by the math whiz, that the chance of a sexually active African male had more than a 70 percent chance of catching HIV during his lifetime. It's unclear from context whether he doubted his own numbers (if so, why would he publish them?) or whether the colleague did. The latter seems more likely. |
| Page 320: | "In New York America's ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, announced plans to use the U.S. presidency of the Security Council to convene a special session on AIDS—the first time ever that a health issue had achieved that level of UN attention." |
| Missing comma: S/B "New York, America's". |
| Page 320: | "The U.S. government, like the Bank, was finally waking up to the pandemic because the evidence of its impact was now too stark to ignore—1999 was the year when AIDS finally surpassed all other causes of death in Africa. Yet the change at the Bank also owed something to an internal coincidence as well—to an unlikely partnership, in fact, between a huge Swiss champion of gay rights and a motherly Ethiopian doctor." |
| God bless Mr. Sebastian Mallaby; he has no sense of double entendre. In fact, the sense in which he uses "huge" here becomes clear on page 323: As in all other cases, it means "tall in stature" or "imposing". Except for one oblique reference to someone's excessive girth, height is the only physical dimension I recall Mallaby mentioning. He mentions it several times, in connection with different people. |
| Page 414: | Title in note 6: "The New New Thing: A Silicon Valleyz Story" |
| S/B "Valley". |
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